Restoring an application from a system dump file

• US 9,652,329 B2
• Filed: 06/13/2014
• Issued: 05/16/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 05/12/2014
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Prasad, Aravinda, Salgaonkar, Mahesh J.
• Primary Examiner(s): Leibovich, Yair
• Application Number:
  US14/303,804
• Publication Number:
  US 20150324256A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,068 Days
• Field of Search: 714 15
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0706 the processing taking place on a specific hardware platform or in a specific software environment
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0751 Error or fault detection not based on redundancy power supply failures G06F1/30; network fault management H04L41/06
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0778 Dumping, i.e. gathering error/state information after a fault for later diagnosis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/079 Root cause analysis, i.e. error or fault diagnosis in a hardware test environment G06F11/22; in a software test environment G06F11/36
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0793 Remedial or corrective actions recovery from an exception in an instruction pipeline G06F9/3861; by retry G06F11/1402; for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity H04L69/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1402 Saving, restoring, recovering or retrying
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1438 Restarting or rejuvenating
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1469 Backup restoration techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/80 Database-specific techniques

Abstract

An application is identified that was running at a time of a system crash. A system dump file is received that was created responsive to the system crash. A restoration dataset stored in the system dump file is determined. The application is restored based, at least in part, on the restoration dataset.

Claims

1. A method for restoring an application from a kernel dump file, the method comprising:

identifying an application that was running at a time of a system crash;

receiving a kernel dump file that was created responsive to the system crash;

determining a restoration dataset stored in the kernel dump file;

determining, based on the restoration dataset, if data generated by the application at the time of the system crash was paged out to swap space;

responsive to determining data generated by the application at the time of the system crash was paged out to swap space, extracting swap space information; and

restoring the application based, at least in part, on the restoration dataset and the swap space information, wherein the application is restored to the state it was in at the time of the system crash;

wherein;

at least the receiving, determining, and restoring steps are performed by computer software running on computer hardware.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the restoration dataset includes at least one of the following:

stack, heap, central processing unit state, resources assigned or used including shared memory, shared libraries, open file descriptors and sockets, and thread specific information.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

determining a plurality of target applications to restore that were running prior to the system crash.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

selecting the target application from a list of applications that were running at the time of the system crash.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the application is restored to the state it was in at a time before the system crash.