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

Crash-only software: More than meets the eye

Posted Jul 13, 2006 20:57 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
Parent article: Crash-only software: More than meets the eye

> Writing a crash-safe, quick-recovery state store is an extremely difficult
> task and should be left to the experts (and will make your system easier
> to implement).

One area that would be interesting is a set of provable crash-only libraries that people could write into as an API might help this part. This would cut down on the number of people inventing their own that might not be correct.
I honestly wouldn't know where to start on this though :/.

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Crash-only software: More than meets the eye

Posted Jul 14, 2006 19:44 UTC (Fri) by kingdon (subscriber, #4526) [Link]

Prevayler is one such (http://www.prevayler.org/), for Java code which can be written in the right style for Prevayler. Although the concept of Prevayler is pretty simple, there is some nice trickiness in the journaling code (in particular, which makes sure that the data has been sent to disk before acting as if the data has been written, without destroying performance).

Prevayler is not the only journaling code you'll ever need (even if you are writing in Java), but I agree that it makes sense to think in terms of journaling libraries rather than each application trying to get this right (and possibly failing in subtle ways).