A Seminar on

Presented By-
Lalit M. Narde
Roll no. 35 (TE-C)
Guided By-
Prof. T. J. Parvat
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Contents
Abstract
Concept
Common Faults Occurring in an Operating System
Related Work :
1. Minix3
2. Solaris-10
3. Other Approaches
Proposed Architecture
Conclusion
References
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Abstract:

Operating systems serve as executing platforms and
resource managers for applications.

With the development of more complex computer systems and applications,
the required operating systems become complex too.

But the proper management of such complex operating systems by human
beings has shown to be impractical.

So, self managing concepts provide the basis for developing appropriate
mechanisms to handle complex systems with less human interventions.
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Concept:

The Computing complication is mostly attributed to the desire for ubiquity of
heterogeneous and distributed computing resources, services and mechanisms.

Autonomic computing presents the idea of reducing (ideally, removing) human
interventions and making the system management autonomous and more accurate.

IBM defines an autonomic system as a system with four basic features: self-healing,
self-protecting, self-optimizing, and self-configuring.

Such system is featured by being aware of system state and its ability to detect and
recover from known/unknown faults.

Self managing applications can be immune from their executing platforms if the
operating systems under which they are managed are self managed too.
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Common Faults:

Syntactic faults: input parameter faults.

Semantic faults: inconsistent behavior and incorrect results.

Service faults: Faults like real-time violations.

Communication and interaction faults: time-out and service unavailability.

Exceptions: I/O related exceptions and security related exceptions.
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Some faults (like application crash) from which the system can be
recovered without restarting the computer are known as soft faults.

The most critical faults in operating systems are in the form of
exceptions and system call faults when accessing I/O. These
faults are mostly caused by the failure of device drivers and
are considered as hard faults that require the restart of
operating system.
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Related Work:

There have been three notable efforts on introducing autonomic operating systems viz

1. Minix3 [7] operating system that has been developed in Virije University
by Andrew. S. Tanenbaum. Minix3 focuses on reliability and self-healing features,
by reducing the size of kernel and moving device drivers to application layer.

This technique recovers most of operating systems faults and reduces -by moving up-
nearly 70% of the size of operating system kernel code [8, 12], many operating system
kernel faults remain uncontrolled and need to be recovered by human intervention;
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The Minix3 architecture(fig.):
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Related Work:


2. The predictive self-healing mechanism included in Solaris-10 [9] by the Sun
Microsystems. The fault manager and service manager in Solaris-10 are made
responsible to predict the failures of components before they occur, and
reconfiguration agents take proactive actions to handle failures. Simplified
administration, fast and easy repair, and maximum availability are reported as
the strengths of the included mechanism.
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Related Work:

3. Some scientists have taken a different approach to improve the reliability of
Choices operating system via a special exception handling technique. An error
handler manages the kernel errors. Component isolation using a wrapper
prevents error propagation, and using a speculative recovery plan, recovery
orders are directed only to specific components.
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Proposed Architecture:

We opt to minimize the functionality of the core of the operating systems kernel,
as is done Minix3, and then try to make this minimal core as stable as possible.

This core is placed in a three layered architecture in support of self healing attributes.

To achieve this, the operating system must be enabled to perceive when it is performing
healthily and when it is performing unhealthily due to the occurrences of operating
system faults.
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To have an operating system with the above features, we propose a self
healing mechanism that works in four phases:

1. Monitoring
2. Analysis
3. Detection
4. Healing
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u
User app. User app. User app.
Device Device Network
Process Manager Memory Manager
I/O Manager Super-Healing Unit
Hyper-healing Unit Boot Strap
Kernel Process
User layer
Supervisor layer
Hypervisor layer
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Proposed architecture for a self-healing operating system:
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Healthy
state
Unhealthy
state
Healing strategy:
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Conclusion:

Thus one can apply autonomic properties in general, and specifically self healing
properties to operating systems to reduce human involvement in the management
and configuration of operating systems. A new three layered operating system
architecture in support of self healing attributes, as well as an overview of a
self healing mechanism.

Thus the self-healing property is added to operating systems which offers a more
stable execution environment for running applications.
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References:

IEEE paper on How to Realize a Self-Healing Operating System.

Wikipedia.

Minix3 Operating System
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Queries.??