A Generic Checkpoint-Restart Mechanism for Virtual Machines

It is common today to deploy complex software inside a virtual machine (VM). Snapshots provide rapid deployment, migration between hosts, dependability (fault tolerance), and security (insulating a guest VM from the host). Yet, for each virtual machine, the code for snapshots is laboriously developed on a per-VM basis. This work demonstrates a generic checkpoint-restart mechanism for virtual machines. The mechanism is based on a plugin on top of an unmodified user-space checkpoint-restart package, DMTCP. Checkpoint-restart is demonstrated for three virtual machines: Lguest, user-space QEMU, and KVM/QEMU. The plugins for Lguest and KVM/QEMU require just 200 lines of code. The Lguest kernel driver API is augmented by 40 lines of code. DMTCP checkpoints user-space QEMU without any new code. KVM/QEMU, user-space QEMU, and DMTCP need no modification. The design benefits from other DMTCP features and plugins. Experiments demonstrate checkpoint and restart in 0.2 seconds using forked checkpointing, mmap-based fast-restart, and incremental Btrfs-based snapshots

데이터 집약적 응용의 효율적인 시스템 자원 활용을 위한 메모리 서브시스템 최적화

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2020. 8. 염헌영.With explosive data growth, data-intensive applications, such as relational database and key-value storage, have been increasingly popular in a variety of domains in recent years. To meet the growing performance demands of data-intensive applications, it is crucial to efficiently and fully utilize memory resources for the best possible performance. However, general-purpose operating systems (OSs) are designed to provide system resources to applications running on a system in a fair manner at system-level. A single application may find it difficult to fully exploit the systems best performance due to this system-level fairness. For performance reasons, many data-intensive applications implement their own mechanisms that OSs already provide, under the assumption that they know better about the data than OSs. They can be greedily optimized for performance but this may result in inefficient use of system resources. In this dissertation, we claim that simple OS support with minor application modifications can yield even higher application performance without sacrificing system-level resource utilization. We optimize and extend OS memory subsystem for better supporting applications while addressing three memory-related issues in data-intensive applications. First, we introduce a memory-efficient cooperative caching approach between application and kernel buffer to address double caching problem where the same data resides in multiple layers. Second, we present a memory-efficient, transparent zero-copy read I/O scheme to avoid the performance interference problem caused by memory copy behavior during I/O. Third, we propose a memory-efficient fork-based checkpointing mechanism for in-memory database systems to mitigate the memory footprint problem of the existing fork-based checkpointing scheme; memory usage increases incrementally (up to 2x) during checkpointing for update-intensive workloads. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we implement and evaluate our schemes on real multi-core systems. The experimental results demonstrate that our cooperative approach can more effectively address the above issues related to data-intensive applications than existing non-cooperative approaches while delivering better performance (in terms of transaction processing speed, I/O throughput, or memory footprint).최근 폭발적인 데이터 성장과 더불어 데이터베이스, 키-밸류 스토리지 등의 데이터 집약적인 응용들이 다양한 도메인에서 인기를 얻고 있다. 데이터 집약적인 응용의 높은 성능 요구를 충족하기 위해서는 주어진 메모리 자원을 효율적이고 완벽하게 활용하는 것이 중요하다. 그러나, 범용 운영체제(OS)는 시스템에서 수행 중인 모든 응용들에 대해 시스템 차원에서 공평하게 자원을 제공하는 것을 우선하도록 설계되어있다. 즉, 시스템 차원의 공평성 유지를 위한 운영체제 지원의 한계로 인해 단일 응용은 시스템의 최고 성능을 완전히 활용하기 어렵다. 이러한 이유로, 많은 데이터 집약적 응용은 운영체제에서 제공하는 기능에 의지하지 않고 비슷한 기능을 응용 레벨에 구현하곤 한다. 이러한 접근 방법은 탐욕적인 최적화가 가능하다는 점에서 성능 상 이득이 있을 수 있지만, 시스템 자원의 비효율적인 사용을 초래할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 운영체제의 지원과 약간의 응용 수정만으로도 비효율적인 시스템 자원 사용 없이 보다 높은 응용 성능을 보일 수 있음을 증명하고자 한다. 그러기 위해 운영체제의 메모리 서브시스템을 최적화 및 확장하여 데이터 집약적인 응용에서 발생하는 세 가지 메모리 관련 문제를 해결하였다. 첫째, 동일한 데이터가 여러 계층에 존재하는 중복 캐싱 문제를 해결하기 위해 응용과 커널 버퍼 간에 메모리 효율적인 협력 캐싱 방식을 제시하였다. 둘째, 입출력시 발생하는 메모리 복사로 인한 성능 간섭 문제를 피하기 위해 메모리 효율적인 무복사 읽기 입출력 방식을 제시하였다. 셋째, 인-메모리 데이터베이스 시스템을 위한 메모리 효율적인 fork 기반 체크포인트 기법을 제안하여 기존 포크 기반 체크포인트 기법에서 발생하는 메모리 사용량 증가 문제를 완화하였다; 기존 방식은 업데이트 집약적 워크로드에 대해 체크포인팅을 수행하는 동안 메모리 사용량이 최대 2배까지 점진적으로 증가할 수 있었다. 본 논문에서는 제안한 방법들의 효과를 증명하기 위해 실제 멀티 코어 시스템에 구현하고 그 성능을 평가하였다. 실험결과를 통해 제안한 협력적 접근방식이 기존의 비협력적 접근방식보다 데이터 집약적 응용에게 효율적인 메모리 자원 활용을 가능하게 함으로써 더 높은 성능을 제공할 수 있음을 확인할 수 있었다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.1.1 Importance of Memory Resources 1 1.1.2 Problems 2 1.2 Contributions 5 1.3 Outline 6 Chapter 2 Background 7 2.1 Linux Kernel Memory Management 7 2.1.1 Page Cache 7 2.1.2 Page Reclamation 8 2.1.3 Page Table and TLB Shootdown 9 2.1.4 Copy-on-Write 10 2.2 Linux Support for Applications 11 2.2.1 fork 11 2.2.2 madvise 11 2.2.3 Direct I/O 12 2.2.4 mmap 13 Chapter 3 Memory Efficient Cooperative Caching 14 3.1 Motivation 14 3.1.1 Problems of Existing Datastore Architecture 14 3.1.2 Proposed Architecture 17 3.2 Related Work 17 3.3 Design and Implementation 19 3.3.1 Overview 19 3.3.2 Kernel Support 24 3.3.3 Migration to DBIO 25 3.4 Evaluation 27 3.4.1 System Configuration 27 3.4.2 Methodology 28 3.4.3 TPC-C Benchmarks 30 3.4.4 YCSB Benchmarks 32 3.5 Summary 37 Chapter 4 Memory Efficient Zero-copy I/O 38 4.1 Motivation 38 4.1.1 The Problems of Copy-Based I/O 38 4.2 Related Work 40 4.2.1 Zero Copy I/O 40 4.2.2 TLB Shootdown 42 4.2.3 Copy-on-Write 43 4.3 Design and Implementation 44 4.3.1 Prerequisites for z-READ 44 4.3.2 Overview of z-READ 45 4.3.3 TLB Shootdown Optimization 48 4.3.4 Copy-on-Write Optimization 52 4.3.5 Implementation 55 4.4 Evaluation 55 4.4.1 System Configurations 56 4.4.2 Effectiveness of the TLB Shootdown Optimization 57 4.4.3 Effectiveness of CoW Optimization 59 4.4.4 Analysis of the Performance Improvement 62 4.4.5 Performance Interference Intensity 63 4.4.6 Effectiveness of z-READ in Macrobenchmarks 65 4.5 Summary 67 Chapter 5 Memory Efficient Fork-based Checkpointing 69 5.1 Motivation 69 5.1.1 Fork-based Checkpointing 69 5.1.2 Approach 71 5.2 Related Work 73 5.3 Design and Implementation 74 5.3.1 Overview 74 5.3.2 OS Support 78 5.3.3 Implementation 79 5.4 Evaluation 80 5.4.1 Experimental Setup 80 5.4.2 Performance 81 5.5 Summary 86 Chapter 6 Conclusion 87 요약 100Docto

CROCHET: Checkpoint and Rollback via Lightweight Heap Traversal on Stock JVMs

Checkpoint/rollback (CR) mechanisms create snapshots of the state of a running application, allowing it to later be restored to that checkpointed snapshot. Support for checkpoint/rollback enables many program analyses and software engineering techniques, including test generation, fault tolerance, and speculative execution. Fully automatic CR support is built into some modern operating systems. However, such systems perform checkpoints at the coarse granularity of whole pages of virtual memory, which imposes relatively high overhead to incrementally capture the changing state of a process, and makes it difficult for applications to checkpoint only some logical portions of their state. CR systems implemented at the application level and with a finer granularity typically require complex developer support to identify: (1) where checkpoints can take place, and (2) which program state needs to be copied. A popular compromise is to implement CR support in managed runtime environments, e.g. the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), but this typically requires specialized, non-standard runtime environments, limiting portability and adoption of this approach. In this paper, we present a novel approach for Checkpoint ROllbaCk via lightweight HEap Traversal (Crochet), which enables fully automatic fine-grained lightweight checkpoints within unmodified commodity JVMs (specifically Oracle\u27s HotSpot and OpenJDK). Leveraging key insights about the internal design common to modern JVMs, Crochet works entirely through bytecode rewriting and standard debug APIs, utilizing special proxy objects to perform a lazy heap traversal that starts at the root references and traverses the heap as objects are accessed, copying or restoring state as needed and removing each proxy immediately after it is used. We evaluated Crochet on the DaCapo benchmark suite, finding it to have very low runtime overhead in steady state (ranging from no overhead to 1.29x slowdown), and that it often outperforms a state-of-the-art system-level checkpoint tool when creating large checkpoints

Self-Healing Multitier Architectures Using Cascading Rescue Points

Software bugs and vulnerabilities cause serious problems to both home users and the Internet infrastructure, limiting the availability of Internet services, causing loss of data, and reducing system integrity. Software self-healing using rescue points (RPs) is a known mechanism for recovering from unforeseen errors. However, applying it on multitier architectures can be problematic because certain actions, like transmitting data over the network, cannot be undone. We propose cascading rescue points (CRPs) to address the state inconsistency issues that can arise when using traditional RPs to recover from errors in interconnected applications. With CRPs, when an application executing within a RP transmits data, the remote peer is notified to also perform a checkpoint, so the communicating entities checkpoint in a coordinated, but loosely coupled way. Notifications are also sent when RPs successfully complete execution, and when recovery is initiated, so that the appropriate action is performed by remote parties. We developed a tool that implements CRPs by dynamically instrumenting binaries and transparently injecting notifications in the already established TCP channels between applications. We tested our tool with various applications, including the MySQL and Apache servers, and show that it allows them to successfully recover from errors, while incurring moderate overhead between 4.54% and 71.56%

Building Computing-As-A-Service Mobile Cloud System

The last five years have witnessed the proliferation of smart mobile devices, the explosion of various mobile applications and the rapid adoption of cloud computing in business, governmental and educational IT deployment. There is also a growing trends of combining mobile computing and cloud computing as a new popular computing paradigm nowadays. This thesis envisions the future of mobile computing which is primarily affected by following three trends: First, servers in cloud equipped with high speed multi-core technology have been the main stream today. Meanwhile, ARM processor powered servers is growingly became popular recently and the virtualization on ARM systems is also gaining wide ranges of attentions recently. Second, high-speed internet has been pervasive and highly available. Mobile devices are able to connect to cloud anytime and anywhere. Third, cloud computing is reshaping the way of using computing resources. The classic pay/scale-as-you-go model allows hardware resources to be optimally allocated and well-managed. These three trends lend credence to a new mobile computing model with the combination of resource-rich cloud and less powerful mobile devices. In this model, mobile devices run the core virtualization hypervisor with virtualized phone instances, allowing for pervasive access to more powerful, highly-available virtual phone clones in the cloud. The centralized cloud, powered by rich computing and memory recourses, hosts virtual phone clones and repeatedly synchronize the data changes with virtual phone instances running on mobile devices. Users can flexibly isolate different computing environments. In this dissertation, we explored the opportunity of leveraging cloud resources for mobile computing for the purpose of energy saving, performance augmentation as well as secure computing enviroment isolation. We proposed a framework that allows mo- bile users to seamlessly leverage cloud to augment the computing capability of mobile devices and also makes it simpler for application developers to run their smartphone applications in the cloud without tedious application partitioning. This framework was built with virtualization on both server side and mobile devices. It has three building blocks including agile virtual machine deployment, efficient virtual resource management, and seamless mobile augmentation. We presented the design, imple- mentation and evaluation of these three components and demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed mobile cloud model

Standart-konformes Snapshotting für SystemC Virtuelle Plattformen

The steady increase in complexity of high-end embedded systems goes along with an increasingly complex design process. We are currently still in a transition phase from Hardware-Description Language (HDL) based design towards virtual-platform-based design of embedded systems. As design complexity rises faster than developer productivity a gap forms. Restoring productivity while at the same time managing increased design complexity can also be achieved through focussing on the development of new tools and design methodologies. In most application areas, high-level modelling languages such as SystemC are used in early design phases. In modern software development Continuous Integration (CI) is used to automatically test if a submitted piece of code breaks functionality. Application of the CI concept to embedded system design and testing requires fast build and test execution times from the virtual platform framework. For this use case the ability to save a specific state of a virtual platform becomes necessary. The saving and restoring of specific states of a simulation requires the ability to serialize all data structures within the simulation models. Improving the frameworks and establishing better methods will only help to narrow the design gap, if these changes are introduced with the needs of the engineers and developers in mind. Ultimately, it is their productivity that shall be improved. The ability to save the state of a virtual platform enables developers to run longer test campaigns that can even contain randomized test stimuli. If the saved states are modifiable the developers can inject faulty states into the simulation models. This work contributes an extension to the SoCRocket virtual platform framework to enable snapshotting. The snapshotting extension can be considered a reference implementation as the utilization of current SystemC/TLM standards makes it compatible to other frameworkds. Furthermore, integrating the UVM SystemC library into the framework enables test driven development and fast validation of SystemC/TLM models using snapshots. These extensions narrow the design gap by supporting designers, testers and developers to work more efficiently.Die stetige Steigerung der Komplexität eingebetteter Systeme geht einher mit einer ebenso steigenden Komplexität des Entwurfsprozesses. Wir befinden uns momentan in der Übergangsphase vom Entwurf von eingebetteten Systemen basierend auf Hardware-Beschreibungssprachen hin zum Entwurf ebendieser basierend auf virtuellen Plattformen. Da die Entwurfskomplexität rasanter steigt als die Produktivität der Entwickler, entsteht eine Kluft. Die Produktivität wiederherzustellen und gleichzeitig die gesteigerte Entwurfskomplexität zu bewältigen, kann auch erreicht werden, indem der Fokus auf die Entwicklung neuer Werkzeuge und Entwurfsmethoden gelegt wird. In den meisten Anwendungsgebieten werden Modellierungssprachen auf hoher Ebene, wie zum Beispiel SystemC, in den frühen Entwurfsphasen benutzt. In der modernen Software-Entwicklung wird Continuous Integration (CI) benutzt um automatisiert zu überprüfen, ob eine eingespielte Änderung am Quelltext bestehende Funktionalitäten beeinträchtigt. Die Anwendung des CI-Konzepts auf den Entwurf und das Testen von eingebetteten Systemen fordert schnelle Bau- und Test-Ausführungszeiten von dem genutzten Framework für virtuelle Plattformen. Für diesen Anwendungsfall wird auch die Fähigkeit, einen bestimmten Zustand der virtuellen Plattform zu speichern, erforderlich. Das Speichern und Wiederherstellen der Zustände einer Simulation erfordert die Serialisierung aller Datenstrukturen, die sich in den Simulationsmodellen befinden. Das Verbessern von Frameworks und Etablieren besserer Methodiken hilft nur die Entwurfs-Kluft zu verringern, wenn diese Änderungen mit Berücksichtigung der Bedürfnisse der Entwickler und Ingenieure eingeführt werden. Letztendlich ist es ihre Produktivität, die gesteigert werden soll. Die Fähigkeit den Zustand einer virtuellen Plattform zu speichern, ermöglicht es den Entwicklern, längere Testkampagnen laufen zu lassen, die auch zufällig erzeugte Teststimuli beinhalten können oder, falls die gespeicherten Zustände modifizierbar sind, fehlerbehaftete Zustände in die Simulationsmodelle zu injizieren. Mein mit dieser Arbeit geleisteter Beitrag beinhaltet die Erweiterung des SoCRocket Frameworks um Checkpointing Funktionalität im Sinne einer Referenzimplementierung. Weiterhin ermöglicht die Integration der UVM SystemC Bibliothek in das Framework die Umsetzung der testgetriebenen Entwicklung und schnelle Validierung von SystemC/TLM Modellen mit Hilfe von Snapshots