Process Hijacking

Victor Zandy
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin - Madison
zandy@cs.wisc.edu

ABSTRACT

Checkpointing contributes to the performance and flexibility of a distributed system by enabling processes to be migrated to other hosts during their execution. Checkpointing systems usually require the checkpointed program to be re-linked with a checkpointing library before it is executed. A restriction imposed by this requirement is that it is not possible to checkpoint programs already in execution or programs that cannot be re-linked (such as proprietary executables).

We have constructed a checkpointing tool, called the Process Hijacker, that eliminates this restriction. The Process Hijacker makes any running process checkpointable by dynamically re-writing its code. Any process can be hijacked at any time during its execution. No prior preparation of the executable, such as re-linking, is necessary. Instead, the Hijacker dynamically injects a checkpointing library into its target process. In addition, the Hijacker also strips the original system call layer of the process, and replaces it with a remote system call RPC layer. These RPCs ensure that the system calls of the hijacked process will continue to execute correctly after the process migrates.

The Process Hijacker is a synthesis of technologies developed by two systems research groups at UW-Madison, Condor and Paradyn. Condor is a distributed batch processing system designed to support high throughput computing on large pools of commodity workstations. The Hijacker injects a variant of Condor's checkpointing and remote system call libraries into its target. Paradyn is a parallel program performance monitoring system that uses dynamic code re-writing to insert instrumentation into a running program. Its code re-writing technology, called DynInst, is the interface through which the Hijacker binds the Condor libraries to the target process.

In this talk I will explain how the Process Hijacker and its constituent Condor and Paradyn technologies work.

Bio

Victor Zandy is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He is a member of the Paradyn Parallel Performance Tools group, under the direction of Professor Barton P. Miller. He graduated from SUNY Buffalo in 1995 with a BS in Computer Science. In college, he was a math major until the summer of 1993, when he took Professor Mike Lutz's Operating Systems course at RIT. He continued with the mathematician charade in graduate school until the winter of 1998, when his colleagues and family helped him finally accept his preference for systems.

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