ReViveI/O: efficient handling of I/O in highly-available rollback-recovery servers

The increasing demand for reliable computers has led to proposals for hardware-assisted rollback of memory state. Such approach promises major reductions in mean time to repair (MTTR). The benefits are especially compelling for database servers, where existing recovery software typically leads to downtimes of tens of minutes. Unfortunately, adoption of such proposals is hindered by the lack of efficient mechanisms for I/O recovery. This paper presents and evaluates ReViveI/O, a scheme for I/O undo and redo that is compatible with mechanisms for hardware-assisted rollback of memory state. We have fully implemented a Linux-based prototype that shows that low-overhead, low-MTTR recovery of I/O is feasible. For 20-120 ms between checkpoints, a throughput-oriented workload such as TPC-C has negligible overhead. Moreover, for 50 ms or less between checkpoints, the response time of a latency-bound workload such as WebStone remains tolerable. In all cases, the recovery time of ReViveI/O is practically negligible. The result is a cost-effective highly-available server.