Towards Fast and Lightweight Checkpointing for Mobile Virtualization Using NVRAM
Kan Zhong, Duo Liu, Yunsong Wu, Linbo Long, Weichen Liu, Jinting Ren, Renping Liu, Liang Liang, Zili Shao, Tao Li · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems · 2018
Checkpointing is a key enabler of hibernation, live migration and fault-tolerance for virtual machines (VMs) in mobile devices. However, checkpointing a VM is usually heavyweight: the VM's entire memory needs to be dumped to storage, which induces a significant amount of (slow) I/O operations, degrading system performance and user experience. In this paper, we propose FLIC, a fast and lightweight checkpointing machinery for virtualized mobile devices by taking advantages of recent byte-addressable, non-volatile memory (NVRAM). Instead of saving the VM's entire memory to storage, we store its working set pages in NVRAM, avoiding accessing slow flash memory (compared to server-grade SSDs). To further reduce the write activities to flash memory, we propose an energy-efficient data deduplication to eliminate redundant data in VM snapshot and save storage space. Experimental results based on an Exynos 5250 SoC show that our approach can effectively improve the performance of checkpointing in mobile virutalization and save energy.