Report on the third workshop on hot topics in software upgrades (HotSWUp'11)
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
Enhanced operating system security through efficient and fine-grained address space randomization
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
Kitsune: efficient, general-purpose dynamic software updating for C
Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Report on the fourth workshop on hot topics in software upgrades (HotSWUp 2012)
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
Back to the future: fault-tolerant live update with time-traveling state transfer
LISA'13 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Large Installation System Administration
Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems
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Dynamic software updating (DSU), the practice of updating software while it executes, is a lively area of research. The DSU approach most prominent in both commercial and research systems is in-place updating, in which patches containing program modifications are loaded into a running process. However, in-place updating suffers from several problems: it requires complex tool support, it may adversely affect the performance of normal execution, it requires challenging reasoning to understand the behavior of an updated program, and it requires extra effort to modify program state to be compatible with an update. This paper presents preliminary work investigating the potential for state transfer updating to address these problems. State transfer updates work by launching a new process running the updated program version and transferring program state from the running process to the updated version. In this paper, we describe the use and implementation of Ekiden, a new state transfer updating library for C/C++ programs. Ekiden seeks to redress the difficulties of in-place updating, and we report on our experience updating VSFTPD using Ekiden. This initial experience suggests that state transfer provides the availability benefits of in-place DSU approaches while addressing many of their shortcomings.