Memvisor: Application Level Memory Mirroring via Binary Translation

Memory failures are common in clusters, and their destructive effects (e.g., increasing downtime and losing data) make users suffer great loss. Current memory availability strategies mostly require extra expensive hardware. Software approaches based on check pointing technologies intend to reduce the expense, but their high overhead limits the practical usage. In this paper, we present a novel system called Memvisor to provide software mirrored memory for applications. Specifically, all memory write instructions are duplicated. Data written to memory are synchronized to backup space. If memory failures happen, Memvisor will recover the data from the backup space. Compared with traditional software approaches, the instruction-level synchronization lowers the probability of data loss and reduces backup overhead. The results show that even in the worst case, Memvisor outperforms the state-of-the-art software approaches.