One-Click Time Travel

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 recompilation or relinking. The user experience is similar to viewing a YouTube video. A click on a web page launches the VM at an edge node on the Internet. As the VM executes, its contents are demand-paged from an unmodified web server. History-based prefetching is able to sustain acceptable user experience even over last-mile networks. This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and should not be attributed to Carnegie Mellon University or the funding sources.