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+# Nydus Failover and Hot Upgrade
+
+Currently, nydusd supports failover and hot upgrade under fusedev and fscache modes, specifically:
+
+- Nydusd can automatically recover from crashes and continue serving container I/O operations.
+- Users can upgrade nydusd without disrupting container I/O operations, once the old nydusd process exits and the new one starts, it can immediately serve container I/O.
+
+[nydus-snapshotter](https://github.com/containerd/nydus-snapshotter.git) already natively supports the above features.
+
+## How to Use
+
+### Failover
+
+Ensure that the `recover_policy` value in the configuration file of nydus-snapshotter is set to `failover`.
+
+```toml
+[daemon]
+# How to process when daemon dies: "none", "restart" or "failover"
+recover_policy = "failover"
+```
+
+Then restart the nydus-snapshotter service. In this way, when the nydusd process crashes (for example, OOM Killed), nydus-snapshotter will automatically restart and recover the nydusd process.
+
+### Hot Upgrade
+
+By making an HTTP call to the system unix domain socket exposed by nydus-snapshotter (default is `/run/containerd-nydus/system.sock`), you can upgrade the version of the nydusd binary file used by the nydusd process.
+
+The method and path of this HTTP call are: `PUT /api/v1/nydusd/upgrade`
+
+Example request body:
+
+```json
+{
+    "nydusd_path": "/path/to/new/nydusd"
+}
+```
+
+By now only the field `nydusd_path` is required in the request body. More fields (like `version`, `policy`, etc) may be used in the future.
+
+## Design
+
+### State Machine of Nydusd
+
+![state machine of nydusd](images/nydusd-sate-machine.png)
+
+Under normal circumstances, executing the nydusd binary file will create a new nydusd process. At this time, the process is in the `Init` state. Then nydusd issues a `Mount` command to itself, entering the `Ready` state. Subsequently, an external controller (such as nydus-snapshotter) will call the control interface exposed by nydusd and issue a `Start` command, making nydusd enter the `Running` state.
+
+When an external controller (such as nydus-snapshotter) performs failover or hot upgrade, the command to start a new nydusd process will include the `--upgrade` parameter. Thus, after the new nydusd process starts, it will stay in the `Init` state. The external controller (such as nydus-snapshotter) can then issue a `Takeover` command to the new nydusd process, instructing the new nydusd process to perform a `Restore` operation.
+
+### State Saving and Recovery
+
+#### State Information to be Saved and Recovered
+
+1. File handler. In fusedev mode, it's the fuse file; in fscache mode, it's the file handler which is used to cooperate with the linux fscache driver to manage cached blob objects.
+
+2. State of the backend filesystem. For example, the VFS state in fusedev mode, etc.
+
+#### How to Save and Recover
+
+Usually, after the nydusd process enters the `Running` state, the external controller (such as nydus-snapshotter) will notify the nydusd process to save its state information and return it. For nydus-snapshotter, it provides a unix domain socket path to the nydusd process. Nydusd serializes the state information using [the dbs-snapshot crate](https://github.com/kata-containers/dbs-snapshot) and then sends the serialized byte array, using [the sendfd crate](https://github.com/standard-ai/sendfd) (the fd used here is the File Handler referred to in the previous section), through the unix domain socket path provided by nydus-snapshotter. Nydus-snapshotter will store the received state information byte array in memory.
+
+During recovery, the nydusd process is in the `Init` state. Upon receiving the `Takeover` command from nydus-snapshotter, it will receive the state information saved by the old nydusd process sent by nydus-snapshotter through the unix domain socket path. After receiving the state information, nydusd will deserialize it and use it to restore the backend filesystem.
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