High-availability of software systems requires automated handling of crashes in presence of errors. Failure-oblivious computing is one technique that aims to achieve high availability. We note that failure-obliviousness has not been studied in depth yet, and there is very few study that helps understand why failure-oblivious techniques work. In order to make failure-oblivious computing to have an impact in practice, we need to deeply understand failure-oblivious behaviors in software. In this paper, we study, design and perform an experiment that analyzes the size and the diversity of the failure-oblivious behaviors. Our experiment consists of exhaustively computing the search space of 16 field failures of large-scale open-source Java software. The outcome of this experiment is a much better understanding of what really happens when failure-oblivious computing is used, and this opens new promising research directions.
Hosek and Cadar @cite_20 switch between application versions when a bug is detected. This technique can handle failures because some bugs disappear while others appear between versions. We can also use our protocol to systematically explore the sequences of runtime jumps across versions.
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Software systems are constantly evolving, with new versions and patches being released on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, software updates present a high risk, with many releases introducing new bugs and security vulnerabilities. We tackle this problem using a simple but effective multi-version based approach. Whenever a new update becomes available, instead of upgrading the software to the new version, we run the new version in parallel with the old one; by carefully coordinating their executions and selecting the behaviour of the more reliable version when they diverge, we create a more secure and dependable multi-version application. We implemented this technique in Mx, a system targeting Linux applications running on multi-core processors, and show that it can be applied successfully to several real applications such as Coreutils, a set of user-level UNIX applications; Lighttpd, a popular web server used by several high-traffic websites such as Wikipedia and YouTube; and Redis, an advanced key-value data structure server used by many well-known services such as GitHub and Flickr.