
Building a Self-Healing Operating System (2007) [pdf] - steven741
http://choices.cs.illinois.edu/selfhealing.pdf
======
DonHopkins
The Moveable Feast Machine is a "robust-first" computing architecture designed
to create vast distributed self-healing machines out of unreliable parts.

Here is a self healing city simulation in the Moveable Feast Machine. He
causes a disaster in the middle of the city with the "nuke" tool, and it
smoothly grows back and seamlessly repairs. He cuts holes in the wall around
the city, and the grey goo molecular nanotechnology urban sprawl spreads out
and takes over the entire world!

Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc)

Self-Healing Wire in the Movable Feast Machine:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmPnjBhkbF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmPnjBhkbF0)

A Robust Self-Healing Membrane in the Movable Feast Machine:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq0uvF4mm7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq0uvF4mm7Y)

Growth of self healing membranes in the Moveable Feast Machine:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8zVYuV3AQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8zVYuV3AQw)

Intercellular Transport in the Movable Feast Machine (Two cells are
interconnected by self-healing wire):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YucCpYCWpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YucCpYCWpY)

A NAND gate in the Movable Feast Machine (A NAND gate constructed of self-
healing wire, using Message particles to represent quasi-electrons):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5NVk12i3cM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5NVk12i3cM)

The Movable Feast Machine is a robust, indefinitely scalable, computing
architecture:
[https://movablefeastmachine.org/](https://movablefeastmachine.org/)

------
al_ramich
I suppose we have seen advancements in this area in the past 10 years since
this was published. Most applications and OS will at least attempt to recover
all your work. Think a grey area still seems to be around significant upgrades
to OSs when things can go seriously wrong. A recent upgrade of my Mac laptop
collapsed spectacularly with much time spent on repairing the damage.

Good discussion on this topic [https://www.compucom.com/blog/three-reasons-
businesses-need-...](https://www.compucom.com/blog/three-reasons-businesses-
need-self-healing-technology)

~~~
xj9
NixOS[0] makes all changes to your system atomically, and you can easily roll
back to any previous state.

[0]: [https://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/phd-
thesis.pdf](https://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf)

------
xyproto
What would happen if the OS gradually forgot all changes that were made since
factory settings, and all files that mattered were stored somewhere else?
Would it only be annoying, or would it be comfortable to know that the system
would gradually be heading toward the initial "clean" state? :D

~~~
java-man
I think you might be describing Windows 10. Resets default applications on
_each_ reboot.

------
nickpsecurity
I Googled a few more surveys for yall. Here they are:

A Survey on Self-Healing Systems: Approaches and Systems (2010)

[http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/Staff/sd/papers/Zeitschrift%...](http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/Staff/sd/papers/Zeitschrift%20Computing%20H.%20Psaier.pdf)

Tools and Techniques for Designing and Evaluating Self-Healing Systems
(slides)

[http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~rg2023/pubs/Tools%20and%20Techni...](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~rg2023/pubs/Tools%20and%20Techniques%20for%20Designing%20and%20Evaluating%20Self-
Healing%20Systems.pdf)

A Survey of Cloud Computing Fault Tolerance: Techniques and Implementation

[http://tarjomefa.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/8351-English...](http://tarjomefa.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/8351-English-TarjomeFa.pdf)

------
lgats
[https://exif.tools/http://choices.cs.illinois.edu/selfhealin...](https://exif.tools/http://choices.cs.illinois.edu/selfhealing.pdf)

------
norcimo5
How about re-using / hacking intel's ME (Management Engine) for this type of
fault tolerance?

