Compartment, Crash, and Continue: Toward Resilient Monolithic OS Kernels
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Ensuring the availability of monolithic operating system (OS) kernels, like Linux, remains a significant challenge, as an internal fault often brings down the entire system. We introduce a novel approach called kCOMALIVE to enhance kernel resilience. kCOMALIVE builds on the state-of-the-art kernel compartments to contain faults and extend them with crash recovery capabilities. kCOMALIVE employs a checkpoint and restore mechanism to enable fine-grained recovery of failed kernel compartments. kCOMALIVE incorporates compile-time instrumentation to simplify compartment constructions and facilitate deployments. We prototyped kCOMALIVE by extending the HAKC framework and showed its effectiveness at recovering a failed Linux driver.
Authors: Shih-Wei Li, Shih-Hung Tang, Yi-Lin Hsu
Institution: National Taiwan University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Award: G516671549
OpenAlex ID: W7084129047