Application to operating systems

Software aging in operating systems is critical because all the applications running on the operating system fail to execute when the operating system is aging. Although the operating systems are well tested and maintained, they are not aging-free. Our investigation on the Linux bug-fix patches reveals that Linux can cause typical aging errors such as memory leaks. In this chapter, we introduce rejuvenation techniques tailored for operating systems. Rejuvenating the operating system is hard because a naive reboot results in a long disruption of the applications’ services and the unacceptably low performance of the services after the reboot. This is because it takes a long time to reboot the operating system and the reboot loses all the states internal to the operating system, such as file caches, to speed up user-level applications. This chapter introduces three rejuvenation techniques: 1) the phase-based reboot, which targets a quick reboot of the operating system, 2) the warm-cache reboot, which maintains the internal states of the operating system across the reboot, and 3) Dwarf, which maintains the process states across the reboot. All of these techniques rely on virtual machine monitors and thus, we also discuss the rejuvenation of the virtual machine monitors.