OneBarrier: What a Network Must Provide for Transparent Fault Tolerance to Be Free

[2608.14601] OneBarrier: What a Network Must Provide for Transparent Fault Tolerance to Be Free Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Search arXiv Press Enter to search · Advanced search Computer Science > Networking and Internet Architecture arXiv:2608.14601 (cs) [Submitted on 2 Jul 2026] Title: OneBarrier: What a Network Must Provide for Transparent Fault Tolerance to Be Free Authors: Bojie Li View a PDF of the paper titled OneBarrier: What a Network Must Provide for Transparent Fault Tolerance to Be Free, by Bojie Li View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: Transparent fault tolerance -- making an unmodified server binary survive crashes -- has been pursued for four decades without reaching production. Every attempt paid three costs on the critical path: recording message arrival order for replay, coordinating a consistent snapshot, and holding each reply until the state that produced it was durable. This paper argues the costs are not intrinsic: they are the price of a network that guarantees neither order nor delivery. We state four conditions under which all three vanish. Three concern the network: Order (messages are delivered in one global sequence), Barrier (delivery is confirmed by a commit barrier), and Durability (each message is replicated to backups before its barrier completes). The fourth, Determinism, falls to the host: a user-space shim closes it for unmodified binaries at 2-10% overhead -- virtual time, virtualized randomness, and share-nothing sharding in place of thread scheduling. OneBarrier realizes all four conditions over an in-network total-order fabric (1Pipe) with microsecond round trips. Fifteen unmodified applications -- including Redis, Memcached, Nginx, this http URL , and a multi-process PostgreSQL -- recover byte-identically, and crash injection confirms linearizable, exactly-once histories; the core protocols are machine-checked in TLA+. A durable write placed inside the barrier adds 4.6 microseconds to a request; the same write placed after it adds three milliseconds. On a network that meets the conditions, fault tolerance is a property, not a tax. Subjects: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) ; Operating Systems (cs.OS) Cite as: arXiv:2608.14601 [cs.NI] (or arXiv:2608.14601v1 [cs.NI] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14601 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Bojie Li [ view email ] [v1] Thu, 2 Jul 2026 13:46:31 UTC (358 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled OneBarrier: What a Network Must Provide for Transparent Fault Tolerance to Be Free, by Bojie Li View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.NI < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.OS References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? ) We gratefully acknowledge support from our major funders , member institutions , , and all contributors. About · Help · Contact · Subscribe · Copyright · Privacy · Accessibility · Operational Status (opens in new tab) Major funding support from

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