Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:51:28 +0200 | From | Daniel Lezcano <> | Subject | Re: [RFC v7][PATCH 0/9] Kernel based checkpoint/restart |
| |
Ingo Molnar wrote: > * Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote: > >> On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 12:21 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: >>> On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:40:28 -0400 >>> Oren Laadan <orenl@cs.columbia.edu> wrote: >>>> These patches implement basic checkpoint-restart [CR]. This version >>>> (v7) supports basic tasks with simple private memory, and open files >>>> (regular files and directories only). >>> - how useful is this code as it stands in real-world usage? >> Right now, an application must be specifically written to use these >> mew system calls. It must be a single process and not share any >> resources with other processes. The only file descriptors that may be >> open are simple files and may not include sockets or pipes. >> >> What this means in practice is that it is useful for a simple app >> doing computational work. > > say a chemistry application doing calculations. Or a raytracer with a > large job. Both can take many hours (days!) even on very fast machine > and the restrictions on rebootability can hurt in such cases. > > You should reach a minimal level of initial practical utility: say some > helper tool that allows testers to checkpoint and restore a real PovRay > session - without any modification to a stock distro PovRay.
There are the liblxc userspace tools doing that.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lxc/
There are the lxc-checkpoint and lxc-restart commands to test the Oren's patches with the external checkpoint Cedric did. These commands are experimental and under development so a hack may be necessary for checkpoint/restart.
I didn't tried with Oren's external checkpoint yet, but I think the commands should work. Actually these commands relies on the freezer, so the checkpoint command does freeze, checkpoint, unfreeze. (and kill if specified).
lxc-create -n foo
lxc-start -n foo mypovray
lxc-checkpoint -s -n foo > myckptfile
lxc-restart -n foo < myckptfile
Thanks -- Daniel
| |