Software fault tolerant technique is a means used to guarantee the high reliability and high credibility in systems. This paper proposes a checkpointing-based task recovery mechanism on the VxWorks operating system. Three methods are adopted to solve the checkpointing-based task recovery problem through analyzing the contents of checkpoint files in VxWorks: the variation of memory address is solved based on the active management of pre-allocated memory; the system kernel object pools are built to realize the recovery of kernel object supporting the synchronization and communication between multi tasks; and the task recovery middleware in user layer is designed to achieve the checkpointing setup and task recovery. Finally, the prototype system based on VxWorks and PowerPC is designed and the results show that the use of the checkpointing-based task recovery mechanism can save the task key information correctly and guarantee the validity and consistency of the task recovery.