Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 1 Oct 1997 22:30:21 -0600 | From | Victor Yodaiken <> | Subject | Re: Process Migration on Linux - Impossible? |
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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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