Published April 2017 | Version v1
Journal article

Causal-consistent rollback in a tuple-based language

Description

Rollback is a fundamental technique for ensuring reliability of systems, allowing one, in case of troubles, to recover a past system state. However, the definition of rollback in a concurrent/distributed scenario is quite tricky. We propose an approach based on the notion of causal-consistent reversibility: any given past action can be undone, provided that all the actions caused by it are undone as well. Given that, we define a rollback as the minimal causal-consistent sequence of backward steps able to undo a given action. We define the semantics of such a rollback operator, and show that it satisfies the above specification. The approach that we present is quite general, but we instantiate it in the case of µKlaim, a formal coordination language based on distributed tuple spaces. We remark that this is the first definition of causal-consistent rollback in a shared-memory setting. We illustrate the use of rollback in µKlaim on a simple, but realistic, application scenario.

Abstract

International audience

Additional details

Identifiers

URL
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01633260
URN
urn:oai:HAL:hal-01633260v1