Microreboot

Microreboot is a technique used to recover from failures in software systems. Instead of rebooting the whole system, only subsets of fine-grain components are restarted. The granularity of components is typically finer than the process level (e.g., EJB-level in J2EE systems).

The goal of confining the reboot to fine-grain components is threefold: to reduce the amount of time it takes for the system to return to service, to minimize the failure s disruption to the system and its users, and to preserve as much in-memory application data as possible.

For a system to be microrebootable, it needs to adhere to the principles of crash-only software.

The concept was proposed by George Candea s research group at [ [http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~candea/papers/microreboot/ 3] ].