The Study Of A Self-Healing Computing Oriented OS Architecture

The primary design goal of traditional OS is to provide a virtual machine, which masks details of different kinds of hardware. This makes OS overly layered and the important states of OS are distributed into each layer of the system. Further more, it makes OS not easily to collect or modify its own state information and finally increases the difficulties of fault diagnosis and recovery in the system. In addition, traditional OS doesn't give enough support for the application oriented self-healing computing. eg: i. Monitor processes, in the application system above OS, run at the same privilege level as the normal processes in the application system. This is unconvenient for monitoring. ii. The correctness of monitor process is normally guaranteed only by its developers, restrictive mechanisms at run-time lacked.To these problems above, the dissertation proposes a new OS software architecture oriented self-healing computing. Its design idea originated from the octopus and the restrictive mechanisms among authorities in social organizations. This architecture manages the important states of the whole system centrally and adopts two layers of feedback closed loops. The feedback closed loops running on the higher privilege level monitor the ones running on the lower privilege level. Besides these, the architecture introduces multiple monitor processes to restrict the behaviors of monitor process to a certain extent. Finally, the architecture is verified through a prototype based on automatic control of train.The major innovative features of the architecture are: i. Treat OS and the applications above as one whole system and store the important states of the whole system centrally. ii. Processes with higher privilege level, which restrict each other, monitor processes with lower privilege level.