The Design And Implementation Of Linux Heartbeat Infrastructure Platform

Linux is rapid developed towards enterprise server. Because of the need of enterprise applications and distributed systems, linux needs a failure detection mechanism to solve those problems. Nowadays, linux has not a good and independent solution for failure detection mechanism. The paper introduces an implementation of such system.On the analysis of the existing linux heartbeat implementation, we design and implement the linux heartbeat infrastructure platform (HBI). We present the multi-tiers architecture, which has three tiers of communication subsystem, heartbeat subsystem and adaptation subsystem, and two assistant subsystems of configuration, log and test. Each subsystem is agile and configurable. The aim of this platform is: independent solution for application and system, application-base detection, detect all communication channels, configurable communication channel.With analyzing present failure detection mechanisms, we researched the heartbeat protocol further. Aim at large scaleable systems, we introduce an improved heartbeat protocol. Such protocol can adjust heartbeat in terms of network topology. Heartbeats are mostly done within subnets, with few heartbeats going between subnets, and even fewer between domains. This protocol also improves the accuracy of the node failure detection. HBI implement this protocol.Last, the paper implement a heartbeat mechanism in linux kernel for those systems that need high efficiency and low memory usage. This system eliminates the memory copies between kernel space and user space, and reduce memory usage by predigest the heartbeat protocol.