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