Fractured processes: adaptive, fine-grained process abstractions
Thanumalayan Sankaranarayana Pillai, Andrea Carol Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau · 2014
Abstract. We introduce Fracture, a novel framework that transforms and modernizes the basic process ab-straction. By “fracturing ” an application into logical modules, Fracture enables powerful and novel run-time configurations that improve run-time testing, applica-tion availability, and general robustness, all in a generic and incremental manner. We demonstrate the utility of fracturing via in-depth case studies of a chat client, a web server, and two user-level file systems. Through these examples, we show that Fracture enables applica-tions to transparently tolerate memory leaks, buffer over-flows, and isolate subsystem crashes, with little change to source code; through intelligent fracturing, we can achieve low overhead as well, thus enabling deployment. 1