FLIC: Fast, lightweight checkpointing for mobile virtualization using NVRAM

Checkpointing is a key enabler of hibernation, live migration and fault-tolerance for virtual machines (VMs) in mobile devices. However, checkpointing a VM is usually heavy-weight: the VM's entire memory needs to be dumped to storage, which induces a significant amount of (slow) I/O operations, degrading system performance and user experience. In this paper, we propose FLIC, a fast and lightweight checkpointing machinery for virtualized mobile devices by taking advantages of recent byte-addressable, non-volatile memory (NVRAM). Instead of saving the VM's entire memory to storage, we store its working set pages in NVRAM, avoiding accessing slow flash memory (compared to server-grade SSDs). To cope with the energy constraint of mobile systems, we further deduplicate VM snapshots, reducing the VM's image size and saving storage space. Experimental results based on an Exynos 5250 SoC show that our approach can effectively improve the performance of checkpointing in mobile virutalization and save energy.