An Operating-System-Level Framework for Providing Application-Aware Reliability

Operating systems enable collecting and extracting rich information on application execution characteristics, including program counter traces, memory access patterns, and operating-system-generated signals. This information can be exploited to design highly efficient, application-aware reliability mechanisms that are transparent to applications. This paper describes the Reliability MicroKernel framework (RMK), a loadable kernel module for providing application-aware reliability and dynamically configuring reliability mechanisms installed in RMK. The RMK prototype is implemented in Linux and supports detection of application/OS failures and transparent application checkpointing. Experiment results show that the OS hang detection and application hang detection, which exploit characteristics of application and system behavior, can achieve 100% coverage and low false positive rates. Moreover, the performance overhead of RMK and the detection/checkpointing mechanisms is small (0.6% for application hang detection and 0.1% for transparent application checkpointing in the experiments).