Crash-only software: More than meets the eye [LWN.net]

Crash-only software: More than meets the eye

Posted Jul 13, 2006 11:39 UTC (Thu) by th0ma7 (guest, #24698)
Parent article: Crash-only software: More than meets the eye

This is by far the article which describe the most the 24/7 environment in which I work in (canadian weather warnings/severe weather prognostics, terminal airport forcasts, etc).

We are regularely faced with the need of having a multithreaded crash only software to be able to keep up our mission critical systems (radars calculations, radars/satellite imagery system, weather bulletins forcasts transmissions, etc)... Systems on which we also try to implement no single point of failure (which actually can be seen has using part of the conception of crash only "hardware" ?) I just did'nt knew there was actually a name/theory for that.

In the past 10 years we've been faced with almost every single aspects described in this article!

I have a strong feeling that our current migration from HPUX -> Redhat -> Debian (which is now heading at the redhat -> Debian part) is the right way to go and that Linux will provide (and actually is providing from my perspective) more tools, more powerfull components, way bigger community at a way lower cost.

Thnx for this really good article and keep up the good work you linux kernel dev. freaks.

- vin

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Crash-only vs fault tolerant

Posted Jul 14, 2006 18:07 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

What you're describing is known by the name "fault tolerant," not "crash-only."

A crash-only program is one that doesn't have a clean shutdown operation. Because the only way to stop the program is to cause a fault, it is obviously fault tolerant as well.

The article makes the point that your fault tolerant code is more likely to work right if you put it in a crash-only program because it gets exercised, and thought about, more.