Highly Reliable Mobile Desktop Computing in Your Pocket

We present DeskPod, a portable system that provides a highly reliable desktop computing environment for mobile users by leveraging rapid improvements in capacity, cost, and size of portable storage devices. DeskPod enables a user's live computing environment to be suspended to portable storage, carried around, easily copied for fault-resilience, and resumed from the storage device to provide the user with the same persistent, personalized computing environment on another computer DeskPod achieves this by providing a virtualization and checkpoint/restart mechanism that decouples a desktop computing environment from any single hardware device so that it can be stored and executed anywhere, improving desktop computing reliability by eliminating a potential single point of failure. We have implemented a Linux DeskPod prototype and demonstrate its ability to quickly suspend and resume desktop sessions, enabling a seamless mobile experience