Pin-Tool based execution backtracking

Abstract

Checkpoint/restart is a common fault tolerant technique which periodically dump state to reliable storage and restart applications after failure. Most of existing checkpoint/restart implementations only handle volatile state and lack of support for persistence state of applications. Even the algorithm specifically designed for file checkpointing may not support complex operations and some need to modify source code. This paper presents a new checkpoint technique, which use dynamic instrumentation to temporarily cache disk operations in memory, and use existing memory checkpoint tool to dump or restore process state at runtime. We show that not only can this method create regular checkpoints for both volatile and persistence state, but also has important applications in execution backtracking.