State of linux checkpointing?

State of linux checkpointing?

[Neal D. Becker]

I wonder if there is a checkpointing that will work with 2.6 kernels?

I only need relatively basic checkpointing.  No sockets or fancy stuff.

Re: State of linux checkpointing?

[Jeff Garzik]

Neal D. Becker wrote:
> I wonder if there is a checkpointing that will work with 2.6 kernels?
> 
> I only need relatively basic checkpointing.  No sockets or fancy stuff.


You only need checkpointing when your application programmers are lazy 
and don't care about data integrity.  :)

	Jeff

Re: State of linux checkpointing?

[Tim Connors]

Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> said on Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:23:00 -0400:
> Neal D. Becker wrote:
> > I wonder if there is a checkpointing that will work with 2.6 kernels?
> > 
> > I only need relatively basic checkpointing.  No sockets or fancy stuff.
> 
> You only need checkpointing when your application programmers are lazy 
> and don't care about data integrity.  :)

Or you are running some kind of cluster where you want the
applications to be checkpointed transparently without the application
knowing the details of how or when they will be swapped out (but this
will need sockets anyway, so won't happen anytime soon).

'Tis a pain that the alpha cluster here can suspend long running jobs
for a pile of smaller jobs, and then resume, but the linux cluster can
do no such fanciness (yes, we do manual checkpointing, but it's prone
to bugs - and finding such a bug after 30 days of compute time really
sucks balls).


-- 
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.

Re: State of linux checkpointing?

[Neal Becker]

Tim Connors wrote:

> Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> said on Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:23:00 -0400:
>> Neal D. Becker wrote:
>> > I wonder if there is a checkpointing that will work with 2.6 kernels?
>> > 
>> > I only need relatively basic checkpointing.  No sockets or fancy stuff.
>> 
>> You only need checkpointing when your application programmers are lazy
>> and don't care about data integrity.  :)
> 
> Or you are running some kind of cluster where you want the
> applications to be checkpointed transparently without the application
> knowing the details of how or when they will be swapped out (but this
> will need sockets anyway, so won't happen anytime soon).
> 

I want checkpointing for:

1) Protect against job interruption due to system crash, operator error,
power loss, whatever

2) Job mygration.  Even manual job mygration would be nice.

Re: State of linux checkpointing?

[Thomas Davis]

Neal Becker wrote:
> 
> I want checkpointing for:
> 
> 1) Protect against job interruption due to system crash, operator error,
> power loss, whatever
> 
> 2) Job mygration.  Even manual job mygration would be nice.
> 
> 

Two possible solutions:

1) http://ftg.lbl.gov/checkpoint

and 

2) http://www.meiosys.com

thomas

Re: State of linux checkpointing?

[Tim Connors]

Thomas Davis <tadavis@lbl.gov> said on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:31:14 -0700:
> Neal Becker wrote:
> > 
> > I want checkpointing for:
> > 
> > 1) Protect against job interruption due to system crash, operator error,
> > power loss, whatever
> > 
> > 2) Job mygration.  Even manual job mygration would be nice.
> 
> Two possible solutions:
> 
> 1) http://ftg.lbl.gov/checkpoint

Oooh. Shiny.

That looks relatively new? I haven't come across it before...

-- 
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
Yesterday, after years of trying, I finally managed to take a photo of a
subway train that said "INSTRUCTION CAR" just so that someday I can caption
it "...but where's the DATA CDR?" when I'm ready to make a joke that's
nerdy even by the standards of jokes about LISP.    -- James "Kibo" Perry

Re: State of linux checkpointing?

[Neal D. Becker]

Tim Connors wrote:

> Thomas Davis <tadavis@lbl.gov> said on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:31:14 -0700:
>> Neal Becker wrote:
>> > 
>> > I want checkpointing for:
>> > 
>> > 1) Protect against job interruption due to system crash, operator
>> > error, power loss, whatever
>> > 
>> > 2) Job mygration.  Even manual job mygration would be nice.
>> 
>> Two possible solutions:
>> 
>> 1) http://ftg.lbl.gov/checkpoint
> 
> Oooh. Shiny.
> 

Looks interesting.  Kernel-2.4 only AFAICT.

Re: State of linux checkpointing?

[Ihar 'Philips' Filipau]

Neal Becker wrote:
> 
> I want checkpointing for:
> 
> 1) Protect against job interruption due to system crash, operator error,
> power loss, whatever
> 
> 2) Job mygration.  Even manual job mygration would be nice.
> 

   Several months ago some guys from Ukrain were announcing special 
patch for kernel which allows you to save task to file, and then later 
to load it from this file.
   Saving task to disk say every 5 seconds - is some sort of 
checkpointing, so later you will be able to go back in time :-)
   You might want to check l-k archives - I cannot recall correctly the 
name of this stuff.

Re: State of linux checkpointing?

[Nur Hussein]

Tim Connors wrote:

> Oooh. Shiny.
> 

There's also another checkpointing project called epckpt written
by Eduardo Pinheiro, which I've created into a kernel patch, ported
to 2.4.22 and added some other stuff for my Masters project:

http://marauder.googgun.com/~obiwan/kernel

You can download both epckpt and the other stuff at the URL above, if
anyone's interested. Unfortunately though, it's also only for 2.4.x.

-= Nur Hussein =-