Building a Self-Healing Embedded System in a Multi-OS Environment

In this paper we describe our approach to improve dependability of a commodity OS for embedded systems. Usually it is too difficult for end-users to resolve the problem inside a single OS, especially for embedded systems. We propose a self-healing mechanism for Linux kernel to improve the system dependability without any operations by administrators. This paper presents our white box approach for monitoring and recovering Linux kernel. Key componentsare a system monitor and a virtual machine monitor. Thesystem monitor is used to detect the inconsistency of datastructures inside Linux kernel. The virtual machine monitorprovides a multi-OS environment and it isolates the systemmonitor from Linux kernel. In a multi-OS environment, thesystem monitor is able to resolve failures inside Linux kernel without stopping crucial services running on another OS. We have developed a prototype for an embedded system toverify our approach. The experiment results show that oursystem can remove hidden processes and reload buggy kernelmodules. The performance evaluation results show that ourself-healing mechanism can be used even when Linux kernelis heavily-loaded and the overhead of the system monitor isvanishingly small in actual use