Towards fast and lightweight checkpointing for mobile virtualization using NVRAM

• Main Authors: Zhong, Kan, Liu, Duo, Wu, Yunsong, Long, Linbo, Liu, Weichen, Ren, Jinting, Liu, Renping, Liang, Liang, Shao, Zili, Li, Tao
• Other Authors: School of Computer Science and Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering; Mobile Virutalization; Checkpointing
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/144764
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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.