SUPPORTING USER MOBILITY IN THE DISTRIBUTED LOGICAL MACHINE SYSTEM

User or program mobility in distributed computing systems is becoming increasingly significant in the modern community since users may chang e their working locations frequently. Job migration is supplementary t o remote login in the support of user mobility. However, the migration facility is not a common feature in distributed systems yet. This is mainly due to the inherent complexity in implementing such a facility. This paper proposes a logical machine migration mechanism that can ef fectively support software environment migration. The basic idea behin d logical machine migration is to migrate a logical machine, including the running processes and their execution environment, by a single me chanism. Thus most of the migration difficulties due to the dependency on the operating system kernel are eliminated. We have realized an ex perimental system, called DLMS386, which successfully demonstrates suc h idea.