OS support for fault tolerance

Maninya M maninya at gmail.com
Tue Feb 14 14:53:45 UTC 2012


For multicore desktop computers, suppose one of the cores fails, the
FreeBSD OS crashes. My question is about how I can make the OS tolerate
this hardware fault.
The strategy is to checkpoint the state of each core at specific intervals
of time in main memory. Once a core fails, its previous state is retrieved
from the main memory, and the processes that were running on it are
rescheduled on the remaining cores.

I read that the OS tolerates faults in large servers. I need to make it do
this for a Desktop OS. I assume I would have to change the scheduler
program. I am using FreeBSD 9.0 on an Intel core i5 quad core machine.
How do I go about doing this? What exactly do I need to save for the
"state" of the core? What else do I need to know?
I have absolutely no experience with kernel programming or with FreeBSD.
Any pointers to good sources about modifying the source-code of FreeBSD
would be greatly appreciated.


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