EE Times online has published an article by Brian Ramsey, of LynuxWorks, about the issues associated with creating high-availability systems under Linux. Ramsey writes . . .

“HA refers to maximizing the availability of systems and applications by decreasing downtime during both routine maintenance operations and unplanned system failures. While not guaranteeing 100 percent uptime, HA systems provide substantial RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) advantages over conventional computer systems” . . .

“Carrier-grade implementations of embedded HA Linux must offer several features to support these components. These including hot-swap support; dual-host/dual-domain switchover control facilities for switching CPUs without interrupting service; intrasystem communications with “heartbeat” and hardware/software watchdog support; software heartbeat, checkpointing and application restart facilities; peer-to-peer backplane messaging; and an event/fault manager application to control the HA events and take corrective action.”

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