Alex Van't Hof, Hani Jamjoom, Jason Neih and Dan Williams
ACM EuroSys
Bordeaux, France, April 2015
Abstract.With the continued proliferation of mobile devices, apps
will increasingly become multi-surface, running
seamlessly across multiple user devices (e.g.,
phone, tablet, etc.). Yet general systems support
for multi-surface app is limited to (1)
screencasting, which relies on a single master
device’s computing power and battery life or (2)
cloud backing, which is unsuitable in the face of
disconnected operation or untrusted cloud
providers. We present an alternative approach: Flux,
an Android-based system that enables any app to
become multi-surface through app migration. Flux
overcomes device heterogeneity and residual
dependencies through two key mechanisms. Selective
Record/Adaptive Replay records just those
device-agnostic app calls that lead to the
generation of app-specific device-dependent state in
system services and replays them on the
target. Checkpoint/Restore in Android (CRIA)
transitions an app into a state in which
device-specific information can be safely discarded
before checkpointing and restoring the app. Our
implementation of Flux can migrate many popular,
unmodified Android apps—including those with
extensive device interactions like 3D accelerated
graphics—across heterogeneous devices and is fast
enough for interactive use.
@inproceedings{jamjoom-flux-eurosys-2015,
author = {Alex Van't and Hof and Hani and Jamjoom and Jason and Neih and Dan and Williams},
title = {{Flux: Multi-Surface Computing in Android}},
booktitle = {ACM EuroSys},
address = {Bordeaux, France},
month = {April},
year = {2015}
}