TY - GEN
T1 - Traveling forward in time to newer operating systems using ShadowReboot
AU - Yamada, Hiroshi
AU - Kono, Kenji
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Operating system (OS) reboots are an essential part of updating kernels and applications on laptops and desktop PCs. Long downtime during OS reboots severely disrupts users' computational activities. This long disruption discourages the users from conducting OS reboots, failing to enforce them to conduct software updates. This paper presents ShadowReboot, a virtual machine monitor (VMM)-based approach that shortens downtime of OS reboots in software updates. ShadowReboot conceals OS reboot activities from user's applications by spawning a VM dedicated to an OS reboot and systematically producing the rebooted state where the updated kernel and applications are ready for use. ShadowReboot provides an illusion to the users that the guest OS travels forward in time to the rebooted state. ShadowReboot offers the following advantages. It can be used to apply patches to the kernels and even system configuration updates. Next, it does not require any special patch requiring detailed knowledge about the target kernels. Lastly, it does not require any target kernel modification. We implemented a prototype in VirtualBox 4.0.10 OSE. Our experimental results show that ShadowReboot successfully updated software on unmodified commodity OS kernels and shortened the downtime of commodity OS reboots on five Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Cent, and SUSE) by 91 to 98%.
AB - Operating system (OS) reboots are an essential part of updating kernels and applications on laptops and desktop PCs. Long downtime during OS reboots severely disrupts users' computational activities. This long disruption discourages the users from conducting OS reboots, failing to enforce them to conduct software updates. This paper presents ShadowReboot, a virtual machine monitor (VMM)-based approach that shortens downtime of OS reboots in software updates. ShadowReboot conceals OS reboot activities from user's applications by spawning a VM dedicated to an OS reboot and systematically producing the rebooted state where the updated kernel and applications are ready for use. ShadowReboot provides an illusion to the users that the guest OS travels forward in time to the rebooted state. ShadowReboot offers the following advantages. It can be used to apply patches to the kernels and even system configuration updates. Next, it does not require any special patch requiring detailed knowledge about the target kernels. Lastly, it does not require any target kernel modification. We implemented a prototype in VirtualBox 4.0.10 OSE. Our experimental results show that ShadowReboot successfully updated software on unmodified commodity OS kernels and shortened the downtime of commodity OS reboots on five Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Cent, and SUSE) by 91 to 98%.
KW - Software updates
KW - Virtual machines
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84875865200&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84875865200&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2451512.2451536
DO - 10.1145/2451512.2451536
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84875865200
SN - 9781450312660
T3 - VEE 2013 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments
SP - 121
EP - 130
BT - VEE 2013 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments
T2 - 9th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, VEE 2013
Y2 - 16 March 2013 through 17 March 2013
ER -