Enabling autonomic behavior in systems software with hot swapping

• Published in: IBM systems journal Vol. 42; no. 1; pp. 60 - 76
• Main Authors: Appavoo, J, Hui, K, Soules, C A N, Wisniewski, R W
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Armonk International Business Machines Corporation 01.01.2003
• Subjects: Algorithms; Design; Operating systems; Software; Studies; Systems design; Workloads
• ISSN: 0018-8670
• DOI: 10.1147/sj.421.0060

Autonomic computing systems are designed to be self-diagnosing and self-healing, such that they detect performence and correctness problems, identify their causes, and react accordingly. These abilities can improve performance, availability, and security, while simultaneously reducing the effort and skills required of system administrators. One way that systems can support these abilities is by allowing montoring code, diagnostic code, and function implementations to be dynamically inserted and removed in live systems. This hot swapping avoids the requisite prescience and additional complexity inherent in creating systems that have all possbile configurations built in ahead of code such as operating systems, hot swapping provides a simpler, higher-performance, and more maintainable method of achieving autonomic behavior. This paper discusses hot swapping as a technique for enabling autonomic computing in systems software. It discusses its disavantages and describes the required system structure. Next, it describes K42, a research operating system that explicitly supports interposition system code. The infrastructure of K42 for hot swapping and several intances of its use demonstrating autonomic behavior are also described.