AppWatch: detecting kernel bug for protecting consumer electronics applications

Most consumer electronics products are equipped with diverse devices since they try to provide more services following the convergence trends. Device drivers for those devices are known to cause system failures. Most previous approaches to enhance reliability have been concerned with the kernel, not with applications. In consumer electronics, however, a main application plays a core role of the product. This paper proposes a new mechanism called AppWatch to keep a consumer electronics application reliable against misbehavior of device drivers. AppWatch exploits page management mechanism of the operating system to protect the address space of the application. Since AppWatch can be implemented at a low engineering cost, it is applicable to most systems only if they have the virtual memory system. AppWatch also provides selective protection of applications so that other unprotected applications are isolated from performance loss, if any. We have tested AppWatch in a consumer electronics environment. The result shows that AppWatch effectively protects application programs at a reasonable performance overhead in most workloads, whereas data-intensive workloads show high overhead. AppWatch also protects applications with little performance interference to other unprotected applications.