KμRB: Kernel microreboot mechanism

Microreboot is a widely implemented autonomic technique that imparts self-healing capability to distributed systems. This paper presents KμRB, a kernel microreboot mechanism that is proposed as a remedy to prevent application state loss after kernel crash. KμRB addresses the most significant limitations of previous approaches such as outdated application state restoration by Checkpoints and prolonged memory reservation to accommodate crash kernel by Otherworld. The framework of this mechanism builds on Kexec and KDump with minimal modifications, which enables rebooting the system with higher probability of the data being preserved. On kernel failure, modified Kexec loads fresh kernel image into main memory, KDump supports booting from nondefault boot location. The fresh kernel restores the application data and eventually replaces the memory occupied by crashed kernel.