The High Availability client-side library provides a drop-in enhancement solution for many standard C Library I/O operations.
The HA library's cover functions allow for automatic and transparent recovery mechanisms for failed connections that can be recovered from in an HA scenario. Note that the HA library is both thread-safe and cancellation-safe.
The main principle of the client library is to provide drop-in replacements for all the message-delivery functions (i.e., MsgSend*). A client can select which particular connections it would like to make highly available, thereby allowing all other connections to operate as ordinary connections (i.e., in a non-HA environment).
Normally, when a server that the client is talking to fails, or if there's a transient network fault, the MsgSend* functions return an error indicating that the connection ID (or file descriptor) is stale or invalid (e.g., EBADF). But in an HA-aware scenario, these transient faults are recovered from almost immediately, thus making the services available again.