Checkpointing virtual machines against transient errors

Abstract

This paper proposes VM-μCheckpoint, a lightweight software mechanism for high-frequency checkpointing and rapid recovery of virtual machines. VM-μCheckpoint minimizes checkpoint overhead and speeds up recovery by saving incremental checkpoints in volatile memory and by employing copy-on-write, dirty-page prediction, and in-place recovery. In our approach, knowledge of fault/error latency is used to explicitly address checkpoint corruption, a critical problem, especially when checkpoint frequency is high. We designed and implemented VM-μCheckpoint in the Xen VMM. The evaluation results demonstrate that VM-μCheckpoint incurs an average of 6.3% execution-time overhead for 50ms checkpoint intervals when executing the SPEC CINT 2006 benchmark.