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SubjectRe: Process Migration on Linux - Impossible?
On Wed, Oct 01, 1997 at 09:40:35PM -0300, Fabio Olive Leite wrote:
> That's why I'm doing it, I'm graduating in Computer Science. I started
> this thread to get some comments and suggestions about it, not to ask

Instead of process migration, wouldn't it be more interesting to
take a more radical approach to the whole problem of network computing.
After all, process migration is a 20 year old idea that relies on a 40
year old idea of a process. Our experience is that process migration
doesn't do anything useful that can't be done with
much simpler remote execution facilities.
So, I don't see why, if we are interested in load balancing
or fault-tolerance, or distributed tasks, we should immediately start
by assuming that process migration is the first requirement. Maybe for
compute intensive components of a program we can get the programmers
to identify compute blocks that have simpler state and are easier to
move around than "processes", but that can really benefit from being
run on a lightly loaded processor. Maybe we can figure out an extension to
BSD ^Z signal that would package up program state in such a way that
a new executable is created that can be restarted later. Maybe
a "process" should be a traveling token that drops off work at net sites
and constructs a data flow machine on the fly. Maybe gui processes
and servers and computational processes are all very different kinds
of things that should be treated differently by the os. ...

The problem that I have with process migration is that it is a stale idea
and OS researchers should be a little more venturesome. Those who want
to relive the Reagan years can go work for Microsoft on the New
Technology of VMS or help Apple strike boldly into the past with
Mach. That's not to say that you cant do something amazing with
process migration, but it strikes me as a poor bet.


---------------------------------
Victor Yodaiken
Department of Computer Science
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Socorro NM 87801
Homepage http://www.cs.nmt.edu/~yodaiken
PowerPC Linux page http://www.cs.nmt.edu/~linuxppc
Real-Time Page http://luz.cs.nmt.edu/~rtlinux


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