An empirical exploratory study on operating system reliability

High-reliability applications run on top of commodity operating systems, which hence must provide high reliable services. In this paper, we conduct an empirical exploratory study on OS reliability. We analyze more than 30,000 real OS failure data collected from different workplace environments. The results show that the main cause of OS failures is related to OS services, and not OS applications or OS kernel. The Gamma and Weibull distributions presented the best fit to the OS failure data. We also found that OS kernel failures are more prevalent in enterprise workplaces than academics, where the observed failure rate in the former was higher than in the latter.

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