Virtual checkpoints: architecture and performance

Checkpoint and rollback recovery is a technique that allows a system to tolerate a failure by periodically saving the entire state and, if an error is detected, rolling back to the prior checkpoint. A technique that embeds the support for checkpoint and rollback recovery directly into the virtual memory translation hardware is presented. The scheme is general enough to be implemented on various scopes of data such as a portion of an address space, a single address space, or multiple address spaces. The technique can provide a high-performance scheme for implementing checkpoint and rollback recovery. The performance. of the scheme is analyzed using a trace-driven simulation. The overhead is a function of the interval between checkpoints and becomes very small for intervals greater than 10⁶ references. However, the scheme is shown to be feasible for intervals as small as 1000 references under certain conditions