Real user-environment migration between heterogeneous ISA platforms

Virtualization technology has recently been widely used due to its various benefits, such as reducing system management efforts and increasing system utilization. Each execution environment can be isolated from other environments as each user can have access to virtual resources provided by the virtualization layer. This achieves benefits such as increasing reliability and security, and increases system mobility because applications and operating systems running on a virtual machine can migrate to other systems using the same virtualization layer. Virtualization technology is being extended to embedded systems, such as mobile phones, as well as to traditional IT systems, such as servers and PCs. Such extended virtualization technology to this domain requires migrating virtual machines between heterogeneous platforms, such as PCs, TVs, and mobile phones, beyond the existing virtual machine migration between homogeneous platforms. Virtual machine migration between heterogeneous platforms has additional benefits, such as increasing computing power of the execution environment, increasing device expandability, and achieving real migration of the user environment.

In this paper, we present the real user- environment migration between heterogeneous platforms and design the architecture. We execute and evaluate virtual machine migration between the x86 platforms and the SPARC platform using our modified QEMU to verify the concept. Users can experience real user-environment migration between heterogeneous platforms using this method.