CMU-CS-14-115
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University


CMU-CS-14-115

Olive: Sustaining Executable Content Over Decades

Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Gloriana St. Clair*, Benjamin Gilbert,
Jan Harkes, Dan Ryan*, Erika Linke*, Keith Webster*

November 2014

CMU-CS-14-115.pdf

This work won the runner-up prize in the May 2014
National Academy of Science Board on Research Data and Information Challenge.


Keywords: Keywords: Scientific reproducibility, virtual machines, demand paging, caching, prefetching, software archiving, software obsolescence, software maintenance, software forensics

We describe a system called Olive that freezes and precisely reproduces the environment necessary to execute software long after its creation. It uses virtual machine (VM) technology to encapsulate legacy software, complete with all its software dependencies. This legacy world can be completely closed-source: there is no requirement for availability of source code, nor a requirement for re- compilation or relinking. The entire VM is streamed over the Internet from a web server, much as video is streamed today.

10 pages


 *Carnegie Mellon University Libraries

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