Frederick Douglis

EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-87-343
February 1987

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-343.pdf

This paper describes a process migration facility for the Sprite operating system. In order to provide location-transparent remote execution, Sprite associates with each process a distinguished home node, which provides kernel services to the process throughout the process's lifetime. System calls that depend on the location of a process are forwarded to the process's home node. Performance measurements based on a few simple benchmarks show that remote execution using the home-node model is efficient as long as the number of system calls that must be forwarded home is small; this appears to be the case as long as file-system-related calls can be handled without involving the home node. The benchmarks also show that the cost of migrating a process can vary from a fraction of a second to many seconds; it is determined primarily by the number of dirty virtual memory pages and file blocks associated with the process.

BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Douglis:CSD-87-343,
    Author = {Douglis, Frederick},
    Title = {Process Migration in the Sprite Operating System},
    Institution = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year = {1987},
    Month = {Feb},
    URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/5363.html},
    Number = {UCB/CSD-87-343},
    Abstract = {This paper describes a process migration facility for the Sprite operating system. In order to provide location-transparent remote execution, Sprite associates with each process a distinguished home node, which provides kernel services to the process throughout the process's lifetime. System calls that depend on the location of a process are forwarded to the process's home node. Performance measurements based on a few simple benchmarks show that remote execution using the home-node model is efficient as long as the number of system calls that must be forwarded home is small; this appears to be the case as long as file-system-related calls can be handled without involving the home node. The benchmarks also show that the cost of migrating a process can vary from a fraction of a second to many seconds; it is determined primarily by the number of dirty virtual memory pages and file blocks associated with the process.}
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Douglis, Frederick
%T Process Migration in the Sprite Operating System
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 1987
%@ UCB/CSD-87-343
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/5363.html
%F Douglis:CSD-87-343