State Inconsistency Issues in Local Area Network-Based Distributed Kernels

ID
TR-85-07
Authors
Samuel T. Chanson and K. Ravindran
Publishing date
August 1985
Abstract
State inconsistency is an inherent problem in distributed computing systems (DCS) because of the high degree of autonomy of the executing entities and the inherent delays and errors in communicating events among them. Thus any reliable DCS should provide means to recover from such errors. This paper discusses the state inconsistency issues and their solution techniques in local area network based distributed kernels. In particular, we deal with state inconsistencies due to i) failures of processes, machines and/or the network, ii) packet losses, iii) new machines joining or exiting from the network, and iv) processes or hosts migrating from one machine to another in the network. The solutions presented are mostly provided within the kernel itself and are transparent to the applications.