Migration without Virtualization

Migrating a live, running operating system from one machine to another has proven to be an invaluable tool over the past few years. Today, however, the only way to migrate an OS is to run it in virtual machine, thereby incurring the disadvantages of virtualization (e.g., virtualized devices often do not keep pace with the latest hardware). This paper proposes a new infrastructure for operating systems to allow direct migration from one physical machine to another physical machine—even if the hardware on the target machine differs from the source. We believe that this approach can be viable and practical as many modern operating systems already provide the initial support necessary through their hibernate and suspend power management infrastructures.