Hi guys! There have already been made many attempts to have the checkpoint/restore functionality in Linux, but as far as I can see there's still no final solutions that suits most of the interested people. The main concern about the previous approaches as I see it was about - all that stuff was supposed to sit in the kernel thus creating various problems. I'd like to bring this subject back again proposing the way of how to implement c/r mostly in the userspace with the reasonable help of a kernel. That said, I propose to start with very basic set of objects to c/r that can work with * x86_64 tasks (subtree) which includes - registers - TLS - memory of all kinds (file and anon both shared and private) * open regular files * pipes (with data in it) Core idea: The core idea of the restore process is to implement the binary handler that can execve-ute image files recreating the register and the memory state of a task. Restoring the process tree and opening files is done completely in the user space, i.e. when restoring the subtree of processes I first fork all the tasks in respective order, then open required files and then call execve() to restore registers and memory. The checkpointing process is quite simple - all we need about processes can be read from /proc except for several things - registers and private memory. In current implementation to get them I introduce the /proc/<pid>/dump file which produces the file that can be executed by the described above binfmt. Additionally I introduce the /proc/<pid>/mfd/ dir with info about mappings. It is populated with symbolc links with names equal to vma->vm_start and pointing to mapped files (including anon shared which are tmpfs ones). Thus we can open some task's /proc/<pid>/mfd/<address> link and find out the mapped file inode (to check for sharing) and if required map one and read the contents of anon shared memory. Other minor stuff is in patches and mostly tools. The set is for linux-2.6.39. The current implementation is not yet well tested and has many other defects, but demonstrates the idea. What do you think? Does the support from kernel of the proposed type suit us? Thanks, Pavel _______________________________________________ Containers mailing list Containers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/containers
