[cap-talk] Moving running applications (was: Kernels at Microsoft)

[Bill Frantz]

jed at nersc.gov (Jed Donnelley) on Monday, November 26, 2007 wrote:

>On 11/21/2007 5:18 PM, Norman Hardy wrote:
>> I highly recommend the talk by Eric Traut of Microsoft that is online at
>> http://endeavour.acm.uiuc.edu/UIUC-ACM-RP07-Traut.wmv
>
>I was also favorably impressed by this talk.  I can add my
>recommendation.  I took some notes at home that perhaps I'll
>share at some future time.  However, here I want to comment
>on:
>
>> I.  Moving a running app to another platform is something that Keykos  
>> could perhaps not easily do; we had did not try to design such a scheme.
>> II.  VMware does this and MinWin claims they will too.
>> III.  The VM provides a natural cleavage point to do this.
>
>I'm at least a little bit surprised by pretty much all
>of the above.  Let me address them one at a time:
>
>I.  You say that Keykos (perhaps?) could not easily move an
>application from one 'platform' to another:
>
>...
>
>To move a running application I assume that whatever is
>moving the application has access to all it's state -
>it's memory, registers, and it's c-list.

We always assumed that KeyKOS applications were made up of mutually
suspicious components.  There might not be a place to stand to get to
all the state of the application.

Cheers - Bill

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