TREG: transactional services based on incremental messages

TREG is a new, easy to use recoverable virtual memory library. It implements transactional services using Incremental Messages (IMs), a set of operating system kernel services that provide support for flexible and efficient user-level management of replicated data. Unlike other recoverable virtual memories, TREG automatically tracks data changes, relieving programmers from inserting set-range-like services which are error-prone. Because IMs cope with most of the work, TREG is extremely compact and, using the network memory of commodity PCs with inexpensive 100 Mb/s interfaces, is able to outperform a disk based system such as RVM running on the same host hardware. This paper describes TREG´s design and implementation, showing that IMs are an appropriate tool to build some transactional services with minimum development cost and, thus, with lower probability of introducing design and/or implementation faults