A Diagnosis of Self-Healing Systems

gManZboy writes "We've been hearing about self-healing systems for a while, but (as is usual), so far it's more hype than reality. Well it looks like Mike Shapiro (from Sun's Solaris Kernel group) has been doing a little actual work in this direction. His prognosis is that there's a long way to go before we get fully self-healing systems. In this article he talks a little bit about what he's done, points out some alternative approaches to his own, as well as what's left to do."

Comments

The challenge of a truly self-healing system

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Your operating system provides threads as a programming primitive that permits applications to scale transparently and perform better as multiple processors, multiple cores per die, or more hardware threads per core are added. Your operating system also provides virtual memory as a programming abstraction that allows applications to scale transparently with available physical memory resources. Now we need our operating systems to provide the new abstractions that will enable self-healing activities or graceful degradation in service without requiring developers to rewrite applications or administrators to purchase expensive hardware that tries to work around the operating system instead of with it.

Neither the applications nor the OS should depend on the other providing any failover or self-healing services; they should always be prepared to go it alone if necessary (as it might be the failover system). Services that crash should restart themselves, etc. This part is pretty well done by most enterprise-grade server software. It's the operating systems we're waiting to play catch-up.

And I'm still waiting to see any box that can replace its own power supply after someone flips the 115/230 switch. Once we get that, then we'll have truly self-healing systems. And all you BOFH's out there might be looking for a new career...

Re:One system this will never work on

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps that's a feature Micro$oft are going to provide in Longhorn: self-reinstalation. :p

Re:Had this 3 years ago

[ozmanjusri]

If the future holds more of this I hope I die soon.

Your support request has been logged and a field technician has been sent to solve your problem.

Thank you for using IBM.

too late

[Anne Thwacks]

But I read in 1958 that we would have self healing systems "within a decade" - surely we must have had them for over 30 years!