CacheMind: Fast performance recovery using a virtual machine monitor

Abstract

The reboot of an operating system is a final but powerful recovery technique. However, the system performance is largely degraded just after the reboot due to losing the file cache. For fast performance recovery, we propose a new reboot mechanism called the warm-cache reboot. The warm-cache reboot preserves the file cache on main memory during the reboot and enables an operating system to restore the file cache after the reboot. A virtual machine monitor (VMM) underlying an operating system guarantees that the reused file 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. From our experimental results, the warm-cache reboot decreases performance degradation just after the reboot. In addition, we confirmed that the file cache corrupted by faults was not reused.