Category Archives: Systems

BullFrog: Online Schema Migration, On Demand

I did my PhD on a topic I called dynamic software updating (DSU), a process by which a running application is updated with new functionality, whether to add features or fix bugs, without shutting it down. As a faculty member, I supervised several PhD students on DSU projects. These considered the semantics of DSU and ways of reasoning about and/or testing a dynamic update’s correctness (including while it’s deployed), and ways of implementing DSU, using compilation, libraries, and/or code rewriting. All of this work resulted in what are, as far as I’m aware, still the most full-featured and efficient implementations of DSU for C and Java, to date.

While DSU handles the update of long-running, single-process applications, many long-running applications also involve a database management system (DBMS) to store persistent application data. For example, an online market will have a front end to present the user interface, but the market’s inventory, purchase log, user reviews, etc. will be stored in the back-end database. As such, a single logical change to an application could well involve individual changes to both the front-end code and the contents and format of the database. Maybe our upgraded market now provides access to an item’s price history, which is implemented by extending the DB schema and by adding front-end functionality to query/access this information. To realize this upgrade dynamically, we need to change the application and the database, in one logical step. 

In a paper presented at SIGMOD this month, we describe Bullfrog, a new DBMS that supports online schema updates in a way that enables whole-application upgrades. An application change can be applied by DSU for the front-end instances and by Bullfrog for the back-end DB. A key feature of Bullfrog is that on the one hand, the schema change is immediate, which simplifies front-end/back-end coordination of the update, especially when schema changes are backward incompatible. On the other hand, data migration to the new schema is lazy, as the application demands it. Lazy migration avoids a potentially lengthy update-time pause, which would result in loss of availability, defeating the
whole point of DSU. There were lots of challenges to realizing the lazy updating model. I give a flavor of the approach here; the paper has the details.
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Dynamic Software Updating: Linux 4.0 and Beyond

Last month,  of ZDNet alerted us that Linux 4.0 will provide support for “no-reboot patching.” The gist: When a security patch or other critical OS update comes out, you can apply it without rebooting.

While rebootless patching is convenient for everyone, it’s a game changer for some applications. For example, web and cloud hosting services normally require customers to experience some downtime while the OS infrastructure is upgraded; with rebootless patching, upgrades happen seamlessly. Or, imagine upgrades to systems hosting in-memory databases: Right now, you have to checkpoint the DB to stable storage, stop the system, upgrade it, restart it, read the data from stable storage, and restart service. Just the checkpointing and re-reading from disk could take tens of minutes. With rebootless patching, this disruption is avoided; cf. Facebook’s usage of a modified memcached that supports preserving state across updates.

I’m particularly excited by this announcement because I’ve been working on the general problem of updating running software, which I call dynamic software updating (DSU), for nearly 15 years. In this post, co-authored with my PhD student Luís Pina, I take a closer look at the challenge that DSU presents, showing that what Linux will support is still quite far from what we might hope for, but that ideas from the research community promise to get us closer to the ideal, both for operating systems and hopefully for many other applications as well.

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