Editing Crash-only software

{{Short description|Computer programs that handles failure by restarting}}
{{more citations needed|date=August 2013}}
A '''crash-only software''' is a [[computer program]] that handle failures by simply restarting, without attempting any sophisticated recovery.<ref name="Candea_03">{{cite conference
 | first = George
 | last = Candea
 |author2=Fox, Armando
 | title = Crash-only software
 | book-title = 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
 |date=May 2003
 | location = Lihue, Hawaii, USA
 |url =https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos-ix/crash-only-software
}}</ref>  Correctly written components of crash-only software can [[microreboot]] to a known-good state without the help of a user.  Since failure-handling and normal startup use the same methods, this can increase the chance that bugs in failure-handling code will be noticed,{{Clarify|date=November 2022|reason=Probably needs the whole sentence to be re-written to make the point clear}} except when there are leftover artifacts, such as [[data corruption]] from a severe failure, that don't occur during normal startup.{{Citation needed|date=November 2022}}

Crash-only software also has benefits for end-users. All too often, applications do not save their data and settings while running, only at the end of their use. For example, [[word processor]]s usually save settings when they are closed. A crash-only application is designed to save all changed user settings soon after they are changed, so that the [[persistent state]] matches that of the running machine. No matter how an application terminates (be it a clean close or the sudden failure of a laptop battery), the state will persist.

== See also ==
*[[Autosave]]
*[[End-to-end principle]]

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

==External links==
* https://web.archive.org/web/20060426230247/http://crash.stanford.edu/

[[Category:Operating system technology]]


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