Abstract

Our goal in this paper is to discuss our experience with process migration in the Charlotte distributed operating system. We also drawupon the experience of other operating systems in which migration has been implemented. Aprocess migration facility in adistributed operating system dynamically relocates processes among the component machines. A successful process migration facility is not easy to design and implement. Foremost, a general-purpose migration mechanism should be able to support a range of policies to meet various goals, such as load distribution, and improvedconcurrency, and reduced communication. We discuss howCharlotte'smigration mechanism detaches a running process from its source environment, transfers it, and attaches it into a newenvironment on the destination machine. Our mechanism succeeds in handling communication and machine failures that occur during the transfer.Migration does not affect the course of execution of the migrant nor that of anyprocess communicatin...

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