Curios: Improving reliability through operating system structure

An error that occurs in a microkernel operating system service can potentially result in state corruption and service failure. A simple restart of the failed service is not always the best solution for reliability. Blindly restarting a service which maintains client-related state such as session information results in the loss of this state and affects all clients that were using the service. CuriOS represents a novel OS design that uses lightweight distribution, isolation and persistence of OS service state to mitigate the problem of state loss during a restart. The design also significantly reduces error propagation within client-related state maintained by an OS service. This is achieved by encapsulating services in separate protection domains and granting access to client-related state only when required for request processing. Fault injection experiments show that it is possible to recover from between 87% and 100% of manifested errors in OS services such as the file system, network, timer and scheduler while maintaining low performance overheads.