Fast and correct performance recovery of operating systems using a virtual machine monitor

Abstract

Rebooting an operating system is a final but effective recovery technique. However, the system performance largely degrades just after the reboot due to the page cache being lost in the main memory. For fast performance recovery, we propose a new reboot mechanism called the warm-cache reboot. The warm-cache reboot preserves the page cache during the reboot and enables an operating system to restore it after the reboot, with the help of a virtual machine monitor (VMM). To perform correct recovery, the VMM guarantees that the reused page cache is consistent with the corresponding files on disks. We have implemented the warm-cache reboot mechanism in the Xen VMM and the Linux operating system. Our experimental results showed that the warm-cache reboot decreased performance degradation just after the reboot. In addition, we confirmed that the file cache corrupted by faults was not reused. The overheads for maintaining cache consistency were not usually large.