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 c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Steven Osman, Dinesh Subhraveti, Gong Su, Jason Nieh
• Keywords: Linux Zap Prototype, Operating System, OSDI 2002, Transparent Migration, Zap Virtualization