Analyzing Persistent State Interactions to Improve State Management

  • ,
  • Brad Daniels ,
  • Shan Lu ,
  • Roussi Roussev ,
  • Yi-Min Wang ,
  • Chad Verbowski ,
  • Juhan Lee

ACM SIGMETRICS 2006 |

Published by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

Short Paper.

A primary challenge to building reliable and secure computer systems is managing the persistent state (PS) of the system:  all the executable files, configuration settings and other data that govern how a system functions.  The difficulty comes from the sheer volume of this persistent state, the frequency of changes to it, and the variety of workloads and requirements that require customization of persistent state.  The cost of not managing a are the leading cause of downtime at Internet services, troubleshooting configuration problems is a leading component of total cost of ownership in corporate environments, and malware effectively, unwanted persistent state²is a serious privacy and security concern on personal computers.