GamePod: Persistent Gaming Sessions on Pocketable Storage Devices

We present GamePod, a portable system that enables mobile users to use the same persistent, gaming environment on any available computer. No matter what computer is being used, GamePod provides a consistent gaming environment, maintaining all of a user's games, including active game state. This is achieved by leveraging rapid improvements in capacity, cost, and size of portable storage devices. GamePod provides a middleware layer that enables virtualization and checkpoint/restart functionality that decouples the gaming environment from a host machine. This enables gaming sessions to be suspended to portable storage, carried around, and resumed from the storage device on another computer. GamePod's middleware layer also isolates gaming sessions from the host, protecting the host by preventing malicious executable content from damaging the host. We have implemented a Linux GamePod prototype and demonstrate its ability to quickly suspend and resume gaming sessions, enabling a seamless gaming experience for mobile users as they move among computers.