Residual dependency is defined as "an ongoing need for a host to maintain data structures or provide functionality for a process even after the process migrates away from the host." [2]
Residual dependency affects system reliability
, system performance and system complexity.
For the given reasons it is desirable to reduce residual dependency to a minimum in an efficient approach to design a distributed system.
The DLMS386 reduces the problem by keeping as many states of the machine, communication and I/O as possible within the
logical machine. To minimize the overhead in finding the physical location of a file storage device, DLMS386
uses global logical disk mapping (see page 
). To get around timer problems,
a logical clock migrates with the logical machine to resolve residual clock dependency. Message forwarding
is avoided by implementation of a logical machine location table (see page ).
Problems with video output and keyboard input are resolved by migrating the video buffer and mapping the
logical keyboard device to the physical keyboard of the destination machine.