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Self-Repairing Computers
Roland Piquepaille writes "Our computers are probably 10,000 times faster than they were twenty years ago. But operating them is much more complex. You all have experienced a PC crash or the disappearance of a large Internet site. What to do to improve the situation? This Scientific American article describes a new method called recovery-oriented computing (ROC). ROC is based on four principles: speedy recovery by using what these researchers call micro-rebooting; using better tools to pinpoint problems in multicomponent systems; build an "undo" function (similar to those in word-processing programs) for large computing systems; and injecting test errors to better evaluate systems and train operators. Check this column for more details or read the long and dense original article if you want to know more."
Translation: "when we started this project, we thought we'd be able to spin it off into a hot IPO and get rich!!"
Computers still rely on the original John von Neumann architecture they are not redundant in anyway, there will be always a single point of failure for ever, no matter what you hear about RAID, redundant power suppliers etc.. etc.. basically the self-healing system is based on the same concept, compare that to a natural thing like the nervous system of humans now that is redundant and self healing, a fly has more wires in it's brain than all of the internet nodes, cut your finger and after a couple of days a fully automated autonomous transparent healing system will fix it, if we ever need to create self healing computers we need to radically change what is a computer, we need to break from the John von Neumann not because anything wrong with it but because it is reaching it's limits quickly, we need truly parallel autonomous computers with replicated capacity that increase linearly by adding more hardware, and software paradigms that take advantage of that, try make a self-healing self-fixing computer today and you will end up with a every complicated piece of software that will fail in real life.
I think that's a big fat lie.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
and cron them in.
This concept isn't particularily new. It's easy to write a script that will check a partiular piece of the system by running some sort of diagnostic command (e.g. netstat), parse the output, and make sure everything looks normal. If something doesn't look normal, just stop the process and restart, or whatever you need to do to get some service back up an running, or secured, or whatever is needed to make the system normal again.
Make sure that script is part of a crontab that's run somewhat frequently, and things should recover on their own as soon as they fail (well, within the time-frame that you have the script running within your crontab.)
"Undo" feature? That's what backups are for.
Of course, the article was thinking that this would be built into the software, but I don't think that is that much better of a solution. In fact, I would say that that would make things more complicated than anything.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Exactly. It isn't. I think the people who wrote this are looking at Windows machines, where restarting individual subcomponents is often impossible.
If my Samba runs in trouble and gets its poor little head confused, I can restart the Samba daemon. There's no equivalent on Windows -- if SMB-based filesharing goes down on an NT box, you're restarting the computer, there is no other choice.
My journal has hot
The second paragraph of the "long and dense article" strikes me as hyperbole. I haven't noticed that my computer's "operation has become brittle and unreliable" or that it "crash[es] or freeze[s] up regularly." I have not experienced the "annual outlays for maintenance, repairs and operations" that "far exceed total hardware and software costs, for both individuals and corporations."
Since this is /. I feel compelled to say this: "Gee, sounds like these guys are Windows users." Haha. But, to be fair, I have to say that - in my experience, at least - Windows2000 has been pretty stable both at home and at work. My computers seem to me to have become more stable and reliable over the years.
But maybe my computers have become more stable because I learned to not tweak on them all the time. As long as my system works, I leave it the hell alone. I don't install the "latest and greatest M$ service pack" (or Linux kernel, for that matter) unless it fixes a bug or security vulnerability that actually affects me. I don't download and install every cutesy program I see. My computer is a tool I need to do my job - and since I've started treating it as such, it seems to work pretty damn well.
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I have to say that I am just shocked at the inane reactions on slashdot to this interesting article. Here we have a joint project of two of the most advanced CS departments in the world. David Patterson's name, at least, should be familiar to anyone who has studied computer science in the last two decades since he is co-author of the pre-eminent textbook on computer architecture.
Yet most of the comments (+5 Insightful) are (1) this is pie in the sky, (2) they must just know Windows, har-de-har-har, (3) Undo is for wimps, that is what backups are for, (4) this is just "managerspeak".
Grow up people. They are not just talking about operating systems, they do know what they are talking about. Some of their research involved hugely complex J2EE systems that run on, yes, Unix systems. Some of their work involves designing custom hardware--"ROC-1 hardware prototype, a 64-node cluster with special hardware features for isolation, redundancy, monitoring, and diagnosis."
Perhaps you should just pause for a few minutes to think about their research instead of trying to score Karma points.
Depending on how file sharing "goes down", you may need to restart a different service. Don't be ignorant: it is usually possible to fix an NT box while it's running. However, it's usually easier to reboot, and if it's not too big of a big deal, Windows admins usually choose to reboot rather to go in and figure out what processes they have to kick.