[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Message-ID: <m1abewaeu2.fsf@frodo.ebiederm.org>
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:40:21 -0700
From: ebiederm@...ssion.com (Eric W. Biederman)
To: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serue@...ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Chubb <peterc@...ato.unsw.edu.au>,
Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>,
Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>,
containers@...ts.linux-foundation.org,
linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Dave Hansen <dave@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: checkpoint/restart ABI
"Serge E. Hallyn" <serue@...ibm.com> writes:
> Quoting Peter Chubb (peterc@...ato.unsw.edu.au):
>> Beefing up ptrace or fixing /proc to be a real debugging interface
>> would be a start ... when you can get at *all* the info you need,
>
> Except we don't really want to export all the info you need for a
> complete restartable checkpoint. And especially not make it
> generally writable.
That and unless we get a lot of synergy from authors of debuggers
and debugging code it is a more general and slower interface for
no apparent gain.
> We have also started down that path using ptrace (see cryo, at
> git://git.sr71.net/~hallyn/cryodev.git).
>
> Right before the containers mini-summit, where the general agreement was
> that a complete in-kernel solution ought to be pursued, I had tried
> a restart using a binary format that read a checkpoint file and used
> cryo (userspace using ptrace) for the rest of the restart, only
> because there was no other reasonable way to set tsk->did_exec on
> restart.
Can we please describe this as the giant syscall approach. Instead
of a complete in-kernel solution. There are things like filesystems
that should be checkpointed separately, or not checkpointed at all.
However there is a large set of processes and process state that always
goes together and if you checkpoint a container you always want.
So building something that is roughly equivalent to a binfmt module
but that can save and restore multiple tasks with a single operation
looks like the right granularity.
>> Jeremy> Lightweight filesystem checkpointing, such as btrfs provides,
>> Jeremy> would seem like a powerful mechanism for handling a lot of the
>> Jeremy> filesystem state problems. It would have been useful when we
>> Jeremy> did this...
>>
>> And how! saving bits of files was very timeconsuming.
>
> Yes, we're looking forward to using btrfs' snapshots :)
Yep. And in the case of migration we don't even need to snapshot
a filesystem just mount it from on the target machine. Except for
the unlinked files challenge.
Eric
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
Powered by blists - more mailing lists