From: Ankur Rawat \(Excell Data Corporation\) (a-arawat_at_microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jan 21 2004 - 15:58:05 PST
Nooks is a subsystem to make operating systems reliable and is designed
for commodity processors and operating systems. The paper compares the
Nooks design approach to other approaches such as virtual machines, type
safe languages, etc. The nooks approach is different or unique because
it requires no architectural changes at all.
I found the philosophy and the approach of the authors to address the
issue of reliability very pragmatic and more in step with current
Operating system reality. Basing, reliability on
1. Fault resistance, and not fault tolerance
2. design for mistakes, and not abuse
reflects this. I also noted the great emphasis put on making the
solution backward compatible (more adaptable by the industry), which is
something I have found missing in other research approaches.
Nooks is implemented as layer in the kernel and is designed to be
portable and light weight. The nooks architecture contains four main
components:
* Isolation manager
* Interposition component
* Object tracking
* Recovery agent
The current test environment for Nooks is based on synthetic fault
injection and is artificial. I am not quite certain if the same rate of
recovery will be achievable in a real world scenario.
I wanted the paper to report the metrics where Nooks was at the source
of the faults and how this scenario would be handled or such faults be
detected in the system.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Wed Jan 21 2004 - 15:58:12 PST