Automatic Recovery from Runtime Failures

IEEE Software, 2001

IET Software, 2007

The Trust4All project aims to define an open, component-based framework for the middleware layer in high-volume embedded appliances that enables robust and reliable operation, upgrading and extension. To improve the availability of each individual application in a Trust4All system, a runtime configurable fault management mechanism (FMM) is proposed, which detects deviations from given service specifications by intercepting interface calls. When repair is necessary, FMM picks a repair action that incurs the best tradeoff between the success rate and the cost of repair. Considering that it is rather difficult to obtain sufficient information about third party components during their early stage of usage, FMM is designed to be able to accumulate knowledge and adapts its capability accordingly.

Communications of the ACM, 2006

2003

This paper demonstrates that the dependability of generic, evolving J2EE applications can be enhanced through a combination of a few recovery-oriented techniques. Our goal is to reduce downtime by automatically and efficiently recovering from a broad class of transient software failures without having to modify applications. We describe here the integration of three new techniques into JBoss, an open-source J2EE application server. The resulting system is JAGR-JBoss with Application-Generic Recovery-a self-recovering execution platform.

16th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA'05), 2005

In this paper, we present our approach and architecture for fault diagnosis and self-healing of interpreted objectoriented applications. By combining aspect-oriented programming, program analysis, artificial intelligence, and machine learning techniques, we advocate that our approach can heal a significant number of failures of real interpreted object-oriented applications.

2008 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering - Workshops, 2008

Software systems increasingly integrate Off-The-Shelf (OTS) components. However, due to the lack of knowledge about the reused OTS components, this integration is fragile and can cause in the field a lot of failures that result in dramatic consequences for users and service providers, e.g. loss of data, functionalities, money and reputation. As a consequence, dynamic and automatic fixing of integration problems in systems that include OTS components can be extremely beneficial to increase their reliability and mitigate these risks. In this paper, we present a technique for enhancing component-based systems with capabilities to self-heal common integration faults by using a predetermined set of healing strategies. The set of faults that can be healed has been determined from the analysis of the most frequent integration bugs experienced by users according to data in bug repositories available on Internet. An implementation based on AOP techniques shows the viability of this technique to heal faults in real case studies.

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2013

Embedded and mobile software systems are marked with a high degree of unpredictability and dynamism in the execution context. At the same time, such systems are often mission-critical, meaning that they need to satisfy strict reliability requirements. Most current software reliability analysis approaches are not suitable for these types of software systems, as they do not take the changes in the execution context of the system into account. We propose an approach geared to such systems which continuously furnishes refined reliability predictions at runtime by incorporating various sources of information, including the execution context of the system. The reliability predictions are leveraged to proactively place the software in the (near-)optimal configuration with respect to changing conditions. Our approach considers two representative architectural reconfiguration decisions that impact the system's reliability: reallocation of components to processes and changing the number of component replicas. We have realized the approach as part of a framework intended for mission-critical settings, called REsilient SItuated SofTware system (RESIST), and evaluated it using a mobile emergency response system.

37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'07), 2007

Studies have shown that device drivers and extensions contain 3-7 times more bugs than other code and thus are more likely to fail. Therefore, we present a failure-resilient operating system that can recover from dead device drivers and other critical components-primarily through monitoring and replacing malfunctioning components on the fly-transparent to applications and without user intervention. This paper focuses on the post-mortem recovery procedure. We explain the working of our defect detection mechanism, the policy-driven recovery procedure, and post-restart reintegration of components. Furthermore, we discuss the concrete steps taken to recover from network, block device, and character device driver failures. Finally, we evaluate our recovery mechanism using performance measurements, software fault-injection, and an analysis of the reengineering effort.

2008

We develop the notion of automatic workaround in the context of Web applications. A workaround is a sequence of operations, applied to a failing component, that is equivalent to the failing sequence in terms of its intended effect, but that does not result in a failure. We argue that workarounds exist in modular systems because components often offer redundant interfaces and implementations, which in turn admit several equivalent sequences of operations. In this paper, we focus on Web applications because these are good and relevant examples of component-based (or serviceoriented) applications. Web applications also have attractive technical properties that make them particularly amenable to the deployment of automatic workarounds. We propose an architecture where a self-healing proxy applies automatic workarounds to a Web application server. We also propose a method to generate equivalent sequences and to represent and select them at run-time as automatic workarounds. We validate the proposed architecture in four case studies in which we deploy automatic workarounds to handle four known This work has been supported by the project PerSeoS funded by the Swiss National Fund.

Mobile Networks and Applications, 2009

This paper proposes recoverable class loaders to enable a fast start-up and recovery of Java applications. In contrast to traditional snapshot approaches that create full system images, our approach creates partial snapshots that contain a static part of the execution state of a Java application. It is the state of the class loaders and their associated class objects, which are recovered and used for restart. This is especially useful in the context of mobile devices and mobile services. In the first case it allows to shutdown applications for power-management reasons as their restart takes less time, so power management does not disturb users. In the second case services can be much faster rebooted to cure software faults such as memory leaks. Thus, users will notice a substantially reduced downtime.