Operating System Transactions

Abstract

Applications must be able to synchronize accesses to operating system resources in order to ensure correctness in the face of concurrency and system failures. System transactions allow the programmer to specify updates to heterogeneous system resources with the OS guaranteeing atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID). System transactions efficiently and cleanly solve persistent concurrency problems that are difficult to address with other techniques. For example, system transactions eliminate security vulnerabilities in the file system that are caused by time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTTOU) race conditions. System transactions enable an unsuccessful software installation to roll back without disturbing concurrent, independent updates to the file system. This paper describes TxOS, a variant of Linux 2.6.22 that implements system transactions. TxOS uses new implementation techniques to provide fast, serializable transactions with strong isolation and fairness between system transactions and non-transactional activity. The prototype demonstrates that a mature OS running on commodity hardware can provide system transactions at a reasonable performance cost. For instance, a transactional installation of OpenSSH incurs only 10% overhead, and a non-transactional compilation of Linux incurs negligible overhead on TxOS. By making transactions a central OS abstraction, TxOS enables new transactional services. For example, one developer prototyped a transactional ext3 file system in less than one month.