Virtual Machine Replay Update: Improved Implementation for Modern Hardware Architecture

This paper describes a successive and updated work of Revirt project which presents a virtual machine replay framework on Xen hyper visor. As both the commodity hardware and Xen hyper visor have been changed significantly since the first publication of Revirt, the initial implementation does not meet the needs of modern architecture any more. This paper presents an improved implementation of virtual machine execution replay system called CAS Motion. CAS Motion has three contributions. First, CAS Motion uses the performance monitor of Intel Core2 processor to construct time point of recorded events, which makes the event record more complete and precise. Second, CAS Motion can fully support multi-core hardware platform which is prevalent today. Third, CAS Motion is developed with more general architecture design, which makes it deployable on upstream Xen hyper visor and Dom0. Our experiments under a varity of workloads shows CAS Motion has low performance impact on monitored DomU. The growth of record log is also in acceptable range.