“Otherworld” - Giving Applications a Chance to Survive OS Kernel Crashes

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Alexandre Depoutovitch, University of Toronto
• Monday 28 March 2011, 11:15-12:15
• Small lecture theatre, Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road), Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins.

The default behavior of all commodity operating systems today is to restart the system when a critical error is encountered in the kernel. This terminates all running applications with an attendant loss of “work in progress” that is non-persistent.

Otherworld is a mechanism that microreboots the operating system kernel when a critical error is encountered in the kernel, and it does so without clobbering the state of the running applications. After the kernel microreboot, Otherworld attempts to resurrect the applications that were running at the time of failure. It does so by restoring the application memory spaces, open files and other resources. In the default case it then continues executing the processes from the point at which they were interrupted by the failure. Optionally, applications can have user-level recovery procedures registered with the kernel, in which case Otherworld passes control to these procedures after having restored their process state. Recovery procedures might check the integrity of application data and restore resources Otherworld was not able to restore.

We implemented Otherworld in Linux, but we believe that the technique can be applied to all commodity operating systems. In an extensive set of experiments on real-world applications (MySQL, Apache/PHP, Joe, vi), we show that Otherworld is capable of successfully microrebooting the kernel and restoring the applications in over 97\ of the cases. In the default case, Otherworld adds zero overhead to normal execution. In an enhanced mode, Otherworld can provide extra application memory protection with overhead of between 4\ and 12\%.

This talk is part of the Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Guy Emerson's list
• Interested Talks
• Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks
• Optics for the Cloud
• PMRFPS's
• School of Technology
• Small lecture theatre, Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road), Cambridge
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• personal list
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.