Heterogeneous process migration: issues and an approach

Process migration is the transfer of some significant part of the state of execution of a process from one machine (source) to another (destination), so that the process can resume execution on the destination machine from the point where it stopped execution on the source machine. When the source and destination machines differ significantly in their hardware and software configurations, the transferred process state needs to be translated to a correct state, valid on the destination machine, and such a migration is called a heterogeneous process migration. This paper discusses some of the motivations, problems and issues associated with architectural heterogeneity, especially the effects caused by having different number of registers on the source and destination machines, when doing heterogeneous process migration. It also describes an approach to accomplish heterogeneous process migration while addressing these effects of heterogeneity in register cardinality. The principal advantage of this approach is that it doesn't require any recompilation during the migration phase, and the migrated process can resume execution from a point very close to the point where it stopped execution on the source machine.