research-article

Dynamic software updates: a VM-centric approach

Authors:

Suriya Subramanian,

Kathryn S. McKinleyAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '09: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/1542476.1542478

Published: 15 June 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Software evolves to fix bugs and add features. Stopping and restarting programs to apply changes is inconvenient and often costly. Dynamic software updating (DSU) addresses this problem by updating programs while they execute, but existing DSU systems for managed languages do not support many updates that occur in practice and are inefficient. This paper presents the design and implementation of Jvolve, a DSU-enhanced Java VM. Updated programs may add, delete, and replace fields and methods anywhere within the class hierarchy. Jvolve implements these updates by adding to and coordinating VM classloading, just-in-time compilation, scheduling, return barriers, on-stack replacement, and garbage collection. Jvolve, is safe: its use of bytecode verification and VM thread synchronization ensures that an update will always produce type-correct executions. Jvolve is flexible: it can support 20 of 22 updates to three open-source programs--Jetty web server, JavaEmailServer, and CrossFTP server--based on actual releases occurring over 1 to 2 years. Jvolve is efficient: performance experiments show that incurs no overhead during steady-state execution. These results demonstrate that this work is a significant step towards practical support for dynamic updates in virtual machines for managed languages.

References

[1]

B. Alpern, D. Attanasio, J J. Barton, A. Cocchi, S. Flynn Hummel, D. Lieber, M. Mergen, T. Ngo, J Shepherd, and S. Smith. Implementing Jalapeño in Java. In Proc. OOPSLA, 1999.

Digital Library

[2]

Gautam Altekar, Ilya Bagrak, Paul Burstein, and Andrew Schultz. OPUS: Online patches and updates for security. In Proc. USENIX Security, 2005.

Digital Library

[3]

Jeff Arnold and Frans Kaashoek. Ksplice: Automatic rebootless kernel updates. In Proc. EuroSys, 2009.

Digital Library

[4]

Miles Barr and Susan Eisenbach. Safe upgrading without restarting. In Proc. ICSM, 2003.

Digital Library

[5]

A. Baumann, J. Appavoo, D. Da Silva, J. Kerr, O. Krieger, and R. W. Wisniewski. Providing dynamic update in an operating system. In Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2005.

Digital Library

[6]

Andrew Baumann, Jonathan Appavoo, Robert W. Wisniewski, Dilma Da Silva, et al. Reboots are for hardware: challenges and solutions to updating an operating system on the fly. In Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2007.

Digital Library

[7]

Gavin Bierman, Michael Hicks, Peter Sewell, and Gareth Stoyle. Formalizing dynamic software updating. In Proc. Second International Workshop on Unanticipated Software Evolution, 2003.

[8]

Gavin Bierman, Matthew Parkinson, and James Noble. UpgradeJ: Incremental typechecking for class upgrades. In Proc. ECOOP, pages 235--259, 2008.

Digital Library

[9]

S. M. Blackburn, P. Cheng, and K. S. McKinley. Oil and water? High performance garbage collection in Java with MMTk. In Proc. ICSE, 2004.

Digital Library

[10]

S. M. Blackburn, K. S. McKinley, R. Garner, C. Hoffman, A. M. Khan, R. Bentzur, A. Diwan, D. Feinberg, D. Frampton, S. Z. Guyer, M. Hirzel, A. Hosking, M. Jump, H. Lee, J. E. B. Moss, A. Phansalkar, D. Stefanovi, T. VanDrunen, D. von Dincklage, and B. Wiedermann. Wake up and smell the coffee: Evaluation methodology for the 21st century. Communications of the ACM, 51(8):83--89, August 2008.

Digital Library

[11]

Chandrasekhar Boyapati, Barbara Liskov, Liuba Shrira, Chuang-Hue Moh, and Steven Richman. Lazy modular upgrades in persistent object stores. In Proc. OOPSLA, 2003.

Digital Library

[12]

Haibo Chen, Rong Chen, Fengzhe Zhang, Binyu Zang, and Pen-Chung Yew. Live updating operating systems using virtualization. In Proc. VEE, June 2006.

Digital Library

[13]

Haibo Chen, Jie Yu, Rong Chen, Binyu Zang, and Pen-Chung Yew. POLUS: A POwerful Live Updating System. In Proc. ICSE, 2007.

Digital Library

[14]

Microsoft Corporation. Edit and continue. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bcew296c.aspx, 2008.

[15]

M. Dmitriev. Towards flexible and safe technology for runtime evolution of java language applications. In Proc. Workshop on Engineering Complex Object-Oriented Systems for Evolution, 2001.

[16]

Dominic Duggan. Type-based hot swapping of running modules. Acta Inf., 41(4-5):181--220, 2005.

Digital Library

[17]

Marc Eaddy and Steven Feiner. Multi-language edit-and-continue for the masses. Technical Report CUCS-015-05, Columbia University Department of Computer Science, April 2005.

[18]

Torbjörn Ekman and Görel Hedin. The Jastadd extensible Java compiler. In Proc. OOPSLA, 2007.

Digital Library

[19]

Slashdot forum. Patch the kernel without reboots. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/24/1334234, April 2008. Consists of a lively technical debate about the benefits and drawbacks of in-place dynamic updates vs. using redundant hardware.

[20]

Stephen Gilmore, Dilsun Kirli, and Chris Walton. Dynamic ML without dynamic types. Technical Report ECS-LFCS-97-378, LFCS, University of Edinburgh, 1997.

[21]

Deepak Gupta, Pankaj Jalote, and Gautam Barua. A formal framework for on-line software version change. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 22(2):120--131, 1996.

Digital Library

[22]

G. Hjálmtýsson and R. Gray. Dynamic C classes, a lightweight mechanism to update code in a running program. In Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 1998.

Digital Library

[23]

Yueh-Feng Lee and Ruei-Chuan Chang. Hotswapping linux kernel modules. J. Syst. Softw., 79(2):163--175, 2006.

Digital Library

[24]

Kristis Makris and Rida Bazzi. Multi-threaded dynamic software updates using stack reconstruction. In Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2009.

Digital Library

[25]

Kristis Makris and Kyung Dong Ryu. Dynamic and adaptive updates of non-quiescent subsystems in commodity operating system kernels. In Proc. EuroSys, March 2007.

Digital Library

[26]

Scott Malabarba, Raju Pandey, Jeff Gragg, Earl Barr, and J. Fritz Barnes. Runtime support for type-safe dynamic Java classes. In Proc. ECOOP, 2000.

Digital Library

[27]

Sun Microsystems. Java Platform Debugger Architecture, 2004. This supports class replacement. See http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jpda/.

[28]

Marco Milazzo, Giuseppe Pappalardo, Emiliano Tramontana, and Giuseppe Ursino. Handling run-time updates in distributed applications. In Proc. SAC, 2005.

Digital Library

[29]

Iulian Neamtiu, Jeffrey S. Foster, and Michael Hicks. Understanding source code evolution using abstract syntax tree matching. In Proc. International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, 2005.

Digital Library

[30]

Iulian Neamtiu and Michael Hicks. Safe and timely dynamic updates for multi-threaded programs. In Proc. PLDI, 2009.

Digital Library

[31]

Iulian Neamtiu, Michael Hicks, Jeffrey S. Foster, and Polyvios Pratikakis. Contextual effects for version-consistent dynamic software updating and safe concurrent programming. In Proc. POPL, 2008.

Digital Library

[32]

Iulian Neamtiu, Michael Hicks, Gareth Stoyle, and Manuel Oriol. Practical dynamic software updating for C. In Proc. PLDI, 2006.

Digital Library

[33]

Angela Nicoara, Gustavo Alonso, and Timothy Roscoe. Controlled, systematic, and efficient code replacement for running Java programs. In Proc. Eurosys, 2008.

Digital Library

[34]

D. Oppenheimer, A. Brown, J. Beck, D. Hettena, J. Kuroda, N. Treuhaft, D. A. Patterson, and K. Yelick. Roc-1: Hardware support for recovery-oriented computing. IEEE Trans. Comput., 51(2):100--107, 2002.

Digital Library

[35]

Alessandro Orso, Anup Rao, and Mary Jean Harrold. A technique for dynamic updating of Java software. In Proc. ICSM, 2002.

Digital Library

[36]

J. W. Pratt and J. D. Gibbons. Concepts of Nonparametric Theory. Springer-Verlag, 1981.

[37]

Tobias Ritzau and Jesper Andersson. Dynamic deployment of Java applications. In Proc. Java for Embedded Systems Workshop, 2000.

[38]

D. Scott. Assessing the Costs of Application Downtime. Gartner Group, 1998.

[39]

C. Soules, J. Appavoo, K. Hui, D. Da Silva, G. Ganger, O. Krieger, M. Stumm, R. Wisniewski, M. Auslander, M. Ostrowski, B. Rosenburg, and J. Xenidis. System support for online reconfiguration. In Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 2003.

[40]

Gareth Stoyle, Michael Hicks, Gavin Bierman, Peter Sewell, and Iulian Neamtiu. phMutatis Mutandis: Safe and flexible dynamic software updating (full version). TOPLAS, 29(4):22, August 2007.

Digital Library

[41]

Ewan Tempero, Gavin Bierman, James Noble, and Matthew Parkinson. From Java to UpgradeJ: an empirical study. In Proc. International Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp), 2008.

Digital Library

[42]

The Jikes RVM Core Team. VM performance comparisons, 2007. http://dacapo.anu.edu.au/regression/perf/head.html.

[43]

Taiichi Yuasa. Design and implementation of Kyoto Common Lisp. Journal of Information Processing, 13(3):284--295, 1990.

Digital Library

[44]

Benjamin Zorn. Personal communication, based on experience with Microsoft Windows customers, August 2005.

Cited By

Strömbäck FVarró DEdwards JTaeumel M(2024)Active DSU: Dynamic Software Updates for Active FunctionsProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3689492.3690046(26-37)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3690046
Koziolek HBurger APuthan Peedikayil A(2024)Fast state transfer for updates and live migration of industrial controller runtimes in container orchestration systemsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112004211(112004)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112004
Sokolowski DWeisenburger PSalvaneschi GDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)Change is the only constantProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510065(350-362)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510003.3510065
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Dynamic software updates: a VM-centric approach
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Runtime environments

Recommendations

Practical dynamic software updating for C
Proceedings of the 2006 PLDI Conference

Software updates typically require stopping and restarting an application, but many systems cannot afford to halt service, or would prefer not to. Dynamic software updating (DSU) addresses this difficulty by permitting programs to be updated while they ...
Dynamic software updates: a VM-centric approach
PLDI '09

Software evolves to fix bugs and add features. Stopping and restarting programs to apply changes is inconvenient and often costly. Dynamic software updating (DSU) addresses this problem by updating programs while they execute, but existing DSU systems ...
Active DSU: Dynamic Software Updates for Active Functions
Onward! '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software

Dynamic Software Updating (DSU) is a technique for updating programs without restarting them. It is useful in systems that provide live programming or in system with high availability needs. As a common limitation, existing DSU systems cannot update ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '09: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 2009

492 pages

ISBN:9781605583921

DOI:10.1145/1542476

General Chair:
Michael Hind
IBM Research, USA
,
Program Chair:
Amer Diwan
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 44, Issue 6
PLDI '09
June 2009
478 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1543135
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 June 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

PLDI '09

Sponsor:

PLDI '09: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 15 - 21, 2009

Dublin, Ireland

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 406 of 2,067 submissions, 20%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

156
Total Citations
View Citations
1,057
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)21
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 24 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Strömbäck FVarró DEdwards JTaeumel M(2024)Active DSU: Dynamic Software Updates for Active FunctionsProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3689492.3690046(26-37)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3690046
Koziolek HBurger APuthan Peedikayil A(2024)Fast state transfer for updates and live migration of industrial controller runtimes in container orchestration systemsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112004211(112004)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112004
Sokolowski DWeisenburger PSalvaneschi GDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)Change is the only constantProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510065(350-362)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510003.3510065
Zhao ZHuang DMa X(2022)TOAST: Automated Testing of Object Transformers in Dynamic Software UpdatesJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.1007/s11390-021-1693-137:1(50-66)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-021-1693-1
Newbury KAli KCraik AOnuţ IZulkernine F(2021)Hotfixing misuses of crypto APIs in Java programsProceedings of the 31st Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering10.5555/3507788.3507799(73-82)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3507788.3507799
Zhao ZJiang YXu CGu TMa X(2021)Synthesizing Object State Transformers for Dynamic Software Updates2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00103(1111-1122)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00103
Zhao ZJiang YXu CGu TMa X(2021)PASTA: Synthesizing Object State Transformers for Dynamic Software Updates2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)10.1109/ICSE-Companion52605.2021.00094(211-212)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-Companion52605.2021.00094
Porter BFilho R(2021)A Programming Language for Sound Self-Adaptive Systems2021 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS)10.1109/ACSOS52086.2021.00036(145-150)Online publication date: Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACSOS52086.2021.00036
Huang DZhao ZMa X(2020)Testing for Dynamic Software Update: An Object-State-Oriented ApproachProceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3457913.3457942(41-50)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3457913.3457942
Ahmed BLee SSu MZakari A(2020)Dynamic software updating: a systematic mapping studyIET Software10.1049/iet-sen.2019.020114:5(468-481)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-sen.2019.0201
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents