[Qemu-devel] About VM fork in QEMU

[Xinyang Ge]

Dear QEMU developers,

I am a Ph.D. student in Penn State. And we are currently working on a
project that needs to fork multiple instances of a same VM instance
with exactly same state (e.g., memory layout, registers, etc.) in a
very efficient way. Snapshot is too heavy for us because it needs to
dump the memory state to the filesystem so that reverting is possible
sometime later. Our project does not need to revert a VM to a previous
snapshot but lively clone (or fork) multiple instances and make them
run at the same time. Do you happen to know if it's possible to do
this? What we are envisioning is copy-on-write would happen both on
disks (e.g., qcow2) and memory state (e.g., physical pages).

Thanks,
Xinyang

-- 
Xinyang GE
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University
Homepage: http://www.cse.psu.edu/~xxg113/