An OS-level Framework for Providing Application-Aware Reliability

The 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, which exploits characteristics of application and system behavior, can achieve high coverage (100% in our experiments) and low false positive rate. Moreover, the performance overhead is negligible because instruction counting is performed in hardware