research-article

Wait-Free Code Patching of Multi-Threaded Processes

Authors:

Florian Rommel,

Lennart Glauer,

Christian Dietrich,

Daniel LohmannAuthors Info & Claims

PLOS '19: Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Pages 23 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/3365137.3365404

Published: 27 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In the operation and maintenance phase of a deployed software component, security and bug-fix updates are regular events. However, for many high-availability services, costly restarts are no acceptable option as the induced downtimes lead to a degradation of the service quality. One solution to this problem are live updates, where we inject the desired software patches directly into the volatile memory of a currently running process. However, before the actual patch gets applied, most live-update methods use a stop-the-world approach to bring the process into a safe state; an operation that is highly disruptive for the execution of multi-threaded programs.

In this paper, we present a wait-free approach to inject code changes into a running multi-threaded process. We avoid the disruption of a global barrier synchronization over all threads by first preparing a patched clone of the process's address space. Into the updated address space, we gradually migrate individual threads at predefined quiescence points while all other threads make uninterrupted progress. In a first case study with a simple network service, we could completely eliminate the impact of applying a live update on the request latency.

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Cited By

Yaacoub AMottola LVoigt TRümmer P(2023)Scheduling Dynamic Software Updates in Mobile RobotsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/362367622:6(1-27)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623676
Islam CProkhorenko VBabar M(2023)Runtime software patching: Taxonomy, survey and future directionsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111652200(111652)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111652
Araujo FTaylor TDevanbu PCohen MZimmermann T(2020)Improving cybersecurity hygiene through JIT patchingProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3417056(1421-1432)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368089.3417056
Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences

PLOS '19: Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

October 2019

79 pages

ISBN:9781450370172

DOI:10.1145/3365137

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

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Published: 27 October 2019

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SOSP '19: ACM SIGOPS 27th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

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Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 32 submissions, 53%

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Cited By

Yaacoub AMottola LVoigt TRümmer P(2023)Scheduling Dynamic Software Updates in Mobile RobotsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/362367622:6(1-27)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623676
Islam CProkhorenko VBabar M(2023)Runtime software patching: Taxonomy, survey and future directionsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111652200(111652)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111652
Araujo FTaylor TDevanbu PCohen MZimmermann T(2020)Improving cybersecurity hygiene through JIT patchingProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3417056(1421-1432)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368089.3417056
Islam CProkhorenko VBabar M(undefined)Runtime Software Patching: Taxonomy, Survey and Future DirectionsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4062747
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4062747

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