Autonomic Network Services on a Microkernel

Autonomic computing principles are becoming increasingly important in the design of computing systems. To provide autonomic functionality in network services, at least basic support for self-healing and self-monitoring is required. In this paper, the idea of mission-critical systems that use m-out-of-n decisions is combined with state of the art microkernel technology and the Linux operating system to create dependable network services. No changes to the deployed network applications are required. To achieve this goal, a set of Linux instances is used that run on top of a L4 microkernel [Sterritt, R and Bustard, D (2003)]. A special server component running as a task on L4 takes care of replicating incoming as well as comparing outgoing traffic to and from the multiple Linux instances