Integrating Transactional Rollback and Dynamic Reconfiguration

Most researches on dynamic reconfiguration are based on the notion of safe reconfiguration point. Although the safe reconfiguration point easily guarantees that a module could be safely reconfigured, there are still some disadvantages. For a transparent approach such as stack tracing, the system may be too busy to find the safe reconfiguration point. For a non-transparent approach, the programmer has to preserve the safe reconfiguration point by implementing a synchronization protocol or using synchronization mechanisms.

The safe reconfiguration point, however, is not needed by a dynamically reconfigurable system using transactional rollback. Transactional rollback (Rudys and Wallach 2002) is a facility that can roll back a system to a restartable state. If the underlying system supports transactional rollback, dynamic reconfiguration can start at any desired point. The code in execution can be rolled back to the restartable state, and before restarting the module can be replaced.

Current transactional rollback system for Java (Rudys and Wallach 2002) is not efficient because it is based on transforming the Java code. There still no transactional rollback facility directly built inside the Java virtual machine. Our future work is to develop a transactional rollback enabled Java virtual machine and then use this virtual machine to create a more flexible system for dynamic reconfiguration.

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Vita

Yueh-Feng Lee was born on Nov 1, 1974. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from National Tsing Hwa University in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Science at National Chiao Tung University. His research interests include operating systems, mobile communications, and Java.