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SOSP
2009
ACM

Surviving sensor network software faults

14 years 8 months ago
Surviving sensor network software faults
We describe Neutron, a version of the TinyOS operating system that efficiently recovers from memory safety bugs. Where existing schemes reboot an entire node on an error, Neutron’s compiler and runtime extensions divide programs into recovery units and reboot only the faulting unit. The TinyOS kernel itself is a recovery unit: a kernel safety violation appears to applications as the processor being unavailable for 10–20 milliseconds. Neutron further minimizes safety violation cost by supporting “precious” state that persists across reboots. Application data, time synchronization state, and routing tables can all be declared as precious. Neutron’s reboot sequence conservatively checks that precious state is not the source of a fault before preserving it. Together, recovery units and precious state allow Neutron to reduce a safety violation’s cost to time synchronization by 94% and to a routing protocol by 99.5%. Neutron also protects applications from losing data. Neutron ...
Yang Chen, Omprakash Gnawali, Maria A. Kazandjieva
Added 17 Mar 2010
Updated 17 Mar 2010
Type Conference
Year 2009
Where SOSP
Authors Yang Chen, Omprakash Gnawali, Maria A. Kazandjieva, Philip Levis, John Regehr
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