On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 08:57:10AM -0800, Julian Elischer wrote: > On 2/14/12 6:23 AM, Maninya M wrote: > > For multicore desktop computers, suppose one of the cores fails, the > > FreeBSD OS crashes. My question is about how I can make the OS tolerate > > this hardware fault. > > The strategy is to checkpoint the state of each core at specific intervals > > of time in main memory. Once a core fails, its previous state is retrieved > > from the main memory, and the processes that were running on it are > > rescheduled on the remaining cores. > > > > I read that the OS tolerates faults in large servers. I need to make it do > > this for a Desktop OS. I assume I would have to change the scheduler > > program. I am using FreeBSD 9.0 on an Intel core i5 quad core machine. > > How do I go about doing this? What exactly do I need to save for the > > "state" of the core? What else do I need to know? > > I have absolutely no experience with kernel programming or with FreeBSD. > > Any pointers to good sources about modifying the source-code of FreeBSD > > would be greatly appreciated. > This question has always intrigued me, because I'm always amazed > that people actually try. > From my viewpoint, There's really not much you can do if the core > that is currently holding the scheduler lock fails. > And what do you mean by 'fails"? do you run constant diagnostics? > how do you tell when it is failed? It'd be hard to detect that 'multiply' > has suddenly started giving bad results now and then. > > if it just "stops" then you might be able to have a watchdog that > notices, but what do you do when it was half way through rearranging > a list of items? First, you have to find out that it held > the lock for the module and then you have to find out what it had > done and clean up the mess. > > This requires rewriting many many parts of the kernel to remove > 'transient inconsistent states". and even then, what do you do if it > was half way through manipulating some hardware.. > > and when you've figured that all out, how do you cope with the > mess it made because it was dying? > Say for example it had started calculating bad memory offsets > before writing out some stuff and written data out over random memory? > > but I'm interested in any answers people may have >
How about core redundancy ? effectively this would reduce the amount of available cores in half in you spread a process to run on two cores at the same time but with an option to adjust this per process etc... I don't see it as unfeasable. -- ;s =;
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