Monday, January 17, 2011

Crash-Only Software

This paper is from USENIX 9. HotOS,2003. Paper explores the possibility of designing and implementing a crash-only software. Crash-only software can be defined as a software which can safely crash and recover. Since it crashes safely there is no need to shut it down. Paper explores this on the domain of Internet applications.

Crash-only design depicted as generalization of a typical transactional model that we already have in database systems. Application is divided into crash-only components where similar components can be grouped into bigger crash-only components (Recursive).

All important non-volatile states are managed by dedicated state stores. And note they should also be crash-safe otherwise, it will crash unsafely just after one step. For this purpose crash-safe state stores are chosen such as databases. Paper also describes how inter component communication is done by exemplifying with time-out mechanism. And lastly it explains the restart/recovery mechanism.

References

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