On the Integrity of Lightweight Checkpoints

Paper in proceeding, 2008

This paper proposes a lightweight checkpointing scheme for real-time embedded systems. The goal is to separate concerns by allowing applications to take checkpoints independently while providing them with an operating system service to assure the integrity of checkpoints. The scheme takes error detection latency into account and assumes a broad class of application failure modes. In this paper we detail the design of the operating system service, which offers a very simple programming model to application designers and introduces only a small execution overhead for each checkpoint. Moreover, we describe the usage of model checking to ascertain the correctness of our approach.