A checkpointing tool for Palm operating system

It is foreseeable that handheld devices will be involved in the arena of distributed computing in the near future. To provide a dependable computing environment, check-pointing and rollback recovery is a useful and important technique for fault-tolerant distributed computing systems. For the most popular platform among handhelds, Palm OS, its built-in HotSync tool can take a partial snapshot of a system state, but it synchronizes only the static data in the handheld with a PC. All dynamic data of applications are lost if a failure occurs and the Palm OS is reset. In order to accommodate mobile computing devices with checkpointing and rollback recovery capability, dynamic data such as global variables should be checkpointed to tolerate system reset/crash failure. Therefore, we developed a checkpointing tool, which provides a set of APIs to checkpoint Palm applications. Using the checkpointing tool, dynamic data in a Palm device can be saved and recovered from a system reset. We describe the tool and demonstrate its usefulness in four popular Palm applications.