Process migration based on memory to memory mechanism

Abstract

Process migration involves transferring both static and dynamic states of a process from one machine to another. Migration requires checkpointing the dynamic states of a process, including the process address space, and storing them as files on source machine hard disk. Transferring the checkpointed information needs establishing a network connection, accessing the disk, reading files contents and sending them to the destination machine. This paper presents a migration mechanism that reduces disk access time by exploiting shared memory concept to transfer process address space between machines. This is done by acquiring additional privilege for the destination system that operates on the migrant process. Also, enabling read access rights for a specified region of pages of the process address space in the source machine. This mechanism is implemented on a distributed system of two machines.