Crash-only software refers to a computer program that adheres to crash-only principles that are applied recursively to all components. Specifically demonstrating correctness and robustness with attendant self sufficiency, self recovery and decoupling from all systems upon which it depends and which depend on it.

No assumptions are made about the pristine nature of initial data or persistent state in such systems at startup - a start and a recovery are the same thing. Consequently a shutdown at any time is both permissable and expected. Waiting for a "clean shutdown" is unneccessary. You stop or pause the software by crashing it or simply removing the power from the appliance.

Components made of crash-only software can employ a microreboot to come back to a known state and are known to do so transparently (read that as: no user intervention or popups!) if internal assertions fail.

External links

• http://crash.stanford.edu/
• http://www.stanford.edu/~candea/papers/crashonly/crashonly.html - Original paper