Memory image save/restore

[Chris Lalancette <chris.lalancette@gd-ais.com>]

Hello all,

    I have been trying to implement some sort of save/restore kernel 
memory image for the linux kernel (x86 only right now), without much 
success.  Let me explain the situation:

I have a hardware device that I can generate interrupts with.  I also 
have a machine with 512M of memory, and I am passing the kernel the 
command line mem=256M.  My idea is to generate an interrupt with the 
hardware device, and then inside of the interrupt handler make a copy of 
the entire contents of RAM into the unused upper 256M of memory; later 
on, with another interrupt, I would like to restore that previously 
saved memory image.  This way we can go "back in time", similar to what 
software suspend is doing, but without as many constraints (i.e. we have 
a hardware interrupt to work with, we reserved the same amount of 
physical memory to use, etc.).  Before I went much further, I figured I 
would ask if anyone on the list has tried this, and if there are any 
reasons why this is not possible.

Thank you,
Chris Lalancette

P.S.  If you respond to the list, please CC me; I am not subscribed