Abstract
Modern virtualization technologies have a powerful ability to move a virtual machine (VM) from one physical machine to another, which enables unprecedented flexibility for system fault tolerance and load balancing. However, for physical machines there is no similar capability. This paper describes the detailed design of migrating a physical machine's state from one physical Linux machine to another. This BOotstrapped Migration for Linux OS (BOMLO) capability avoids scheduled shut-down for the maintenance of non-virtualized physical machine and therefore greatly decreases the service disruption time. BOMLO is more challenging than VM migration because there is no separate piece of software to perform the state migration, e.g., the hypervisor in the case of VM migration. In this paper, we adapted the Linux's hibernation facility to develop 3 schemes for BOMLO: swap disk-based, memory-to-memory, and iterative memory-to-memory migration. © 2011 ACM.