A Process Migration Implementation for a Unix System

Abstract:

In this paper we describe the implementation of a process migration mechanism under version 3.0 of the Sun UNIX operating system. Processes that do not communicate with other processes and that do not take actions that depend on knowledge of the execution environment (such as the process id), can be moved from one machine to another while running, in a transparent way. This is achieved by signaling a process to stop, saving all the kernel and memory information that is necessary to restart the process and then, by using this information, restarting the process on the new machine. This new functionality requires minor kernel modifications as well as the creation of a new signal and a new system call.