Fractured Processes: Adaptive, Fine-Grained Process Abstractions

We introduce Fracture, a novel framework that transforms and modernizes the basic process abstraction. By “fracturing” an application into logical modules, Fracture enables powerful and novel run-time configurations that improve run-time testing, application availability, and general robustness, all in a generic and incremental manner. We demonstrate the utility of fracturing via in-depth case studies of a chat client, a web server, and two user-level file systems. Through these examples, we show that Fracture enables applications to transparently tolerate memory leaks, buffer overflows, and isolate subsystem crashes, with little change to source code; through intelligent fracturing, we can achieve low overhead as well, thus enabling deployment.