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The Design and Implementation of Zap: A System for Migrating Computing Environments
We have created Zap, a novel system for transparent migration of legacy and networked applications. Zap provides a thin virtualization layer on top of the operating system that introduces pods, which are groups of processes that are provided a consistent, virtualized view of the system. This decouples processes in pods from dependencies to the host operating system and other processes on the system. By integrating Zap virtualization with a checkpoint-restart mechanism, Zap can migrate a pod of processes as a unit among machines running independent operating systems without leaving behind any residual state after migration. We have implemented a Zap prototype in Linux that supports transparent migration of unmodified applications without any kernel modifications. We demonstrate that our Linux Zap prototype can provide general-purpose process migration functionality with low overhead. Our experimental results for migrating pods used for running a standard user's X windows desktop computing environment and for running an Apache web server show that these kinds of pods can be migrated with subsecond checkpoint and restart latencies.
author = {Steven Osman and Dinesh Subhraveti and Gong Su and Jason Nieh},
title = {The Design and Implementation of Zap: A System for Migrating Computing Environments},
booktitle = {5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 02)},
year = {2002},
address = {Boston, MA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi-02/design-and-implementation-zap-system-migrating-computing-environments},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}
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