A fault-tolerant java virtual machine
Jeff Napper, Lorenzo Alvisi, Harrick M. Vin · 2004
The Java programming language was designed for portability and safe code distribution, not for fault-tolerance. We modify the Sun JDK1.2 to provide transparent fault-tolerance for many Java applications under the crash failure model. Our approach is to log non-deterministic events at the JVM interface using a primary-backup architecture. In particular, we identify the sources of non-determinism in the JVM due to asynchronous exceptions and multi-threaded access to shared data, as well as the non-determinism present at the native method interface. We analyze the overhead introduced in our system by each of these sources of non-determinism and compare the performance of dierent techniques for handling multi-threading.