Improving the reliability of commodity operating systems

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Improving the reliability of commodity operating systems (2003)

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by Michael M. Swift , Brian N. Bershad , Henry M. Levy

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317 - 14 self

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@INPROCEEDINGS{Swift03improvingthe,
    author = {Michael M. Swift and Brian N. Bershad and Henry M. Levy},
    title = {Improving the reliability of commodity operating systems},
    booktitle = {},
    year = {2003},
    pages = {207--222}
}

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Abstract

drivers remain a significant cause of system failures. In Windows XP, for example, drivers account for 85 % of recently reported failures. This article describes Nooks, a reliability subsystem that seeks to greatly enhance operating system (OS) reliability by isolating the OS from driver failures. The Nooks approach is practical: rather than guaranteeing complete fault tolerance through a new (and incompatible) OS or driver architecture, our goal is to prevent the vast majority of driver-caused crashes with little or no change to the existing driver and system code. Nooks isolates drivers within lightweight protection domains inside the kernel address space, where hardware and software prevent them from corrupting the kernel. Nooks also tracks a driver’s use of kernel resources to facilitate automatic cleanup during recovery. To prove the viability of our approach, we implemented Nooks in the Linux operating system and used it to fault-isolate several device drivers. Our results show that Nooks offers a substantial increase in the reliability of operating systems, catching and quickly recovering from many faults that would otherwise crash the system. Under a wide range and number of fault conditions, we show that Nooks recovers automatically from 99 % of the faults that otherwise cause Linux to crash.

Keyphrases

kernel address space automatic cleanup fault condition fault-isolate several device driver driver architecture system code linux operating system window xp reliability subsystem many fault complete fault tolerance driver use vast majority wide range significant cause substantial increase kernel resource nook recovers operating system driver failure lightweight protection domain nook approach driver-caused crash system failure

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