Linux Checkpoint-Restart - v19

Oren Laadan
2010-02-22T23:59:02Z

Hi Andrew,

We've put a stake in the ground for our next set of checkpoint/restart
patches, v19. It has some great new stuff, and we put extra effort to
address your concerns. We would like to have the code included in -mm
for wider feedback and testing.

This one is able to checkpoint/restart screen and vnc sessions, and
live-migrate network servers between hosts. It also adds support for
x86-64 (in addition to x86-32, s390x and powerpc). It is rebased to
kernel 2.6.33-rc8.

Since one of your main concerns was about what is not yet implemented
and how complicated or ugly it will be to support that, we've put up
a wiki page to address that. In it there is a simple table that lists
what is not implemented and the anticipated solution impact, and for
some entries a link to more details.

The page is here: http://ckpt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Checklist

We want to stress that the patchset is already very useful as-is. We
will keep working to implement more features cleanly. Some features we
are working on include network namespaces and device configurations,
mounts and mounts namespaces, and file locks. Should a complicated
feature prove hard to implement, users have alternatives systems like
kvm, until we manage to come up with a clean solution.

We believe that maintenance is best addressed through testing. We now
have a comprehensive test-suite to automatically find regressions.
In addition, we ran LTP and the results are the same with CHECKPOINT=n
and =y.

If desired we'll send the whole patchset to lkml, but the git trees
can be seen at:

kernel: http://www.linux-cr.org/git/?p=linux-cr.git;a=summary
user tools: http://www.linux-cr.org/git/?p=user-cr.git;a=summary
tests suite: http://www.linux-cr.org/git/?p=tests-cr.git;a=summary

Thanks,

Application checkpoint/restart team