Incremental Dynamic Updates with First-class Contexts

Wernli, Erwann; Lungu, Mircea; Nierstrasz, Oscar (2013). Incremental Dynamic Updates with First-class Contexts. Journal of Object Technology, 12(3), pp. 1-27. AITO 10.5381/jot.2013.12.3.a1

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Highly available software systems occasionally need to be updated while avoiding downtime. Dynamic software updates reduce down-time, but still require the system to reach a quiescent state in which a global update can be performed. This can be difficult for multi-threaded systems. We present a novel approach to dynamic updates using first-class contexts, called Theseus. First-class contexts make global updates unnecessary: existing threads run to termination in an old context, while new threads start in a new, updated context; consistency between contexts is ensured with the help of bidirectional transformations. We show that for multi-threaded systems with coherent memory, first-class contexts offer a practical and flexible approach to dynamic updates, with acceptable overhead.

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