Re: Back to the future.

Rafael J. Wysocki
2007-04-27T21:25:53Z

On Friday, 27 April 2007 06:52, Pekka J Enberg wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-04-26 at 09:56 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > which will map in the snapshot, return the mapped address and the size
> > > (and if you want to support snapshots > 4GB, be my guest, but I suspect
> > > you're actually *better* off just admitting that if you cannot shrink
> > > the snapshot to less than 32 bits, it's not worth doing)
>
> On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> > That inherently limits the image to half of available ram (you need
> > somewhere to store the snapshot), so you won't get the full image you
> > express interest in below.
>
> It doesn't. We can make the userspace mapped pages copy-on-write. As long
> as the userspace makes sure there's not much activity during
> snapshot/shutdown, we will be fine. What we probably do need to copy is
> kernel pages.

The user space is (and IMHO should be) frozen way before that and what you're
suggesting here is what I wanted to implement some time ago. The problem with
this was that the user space pages may be updated, for example, by device
drivers as a result of some deferred I/O after we've snapshotted the system.

I didn't know how to find out which pages owned by the user space could be
updated this way, so I gave up at that time.

Greetings,
Rafael