Subject: Re: "partial" container checkpoint
From: Kevin Fox <Kevin.Fox@pnl.gov>
To: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serue@us.ibm.com>, xemul@parallels.com,
       containers@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>, hch@infradead.org, mingo@elte.hu,
       torvalds@linux-foundation.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org
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Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:30:59 -0700
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On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 09:37 -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 10:29 -0500, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> > I think the perceived need for it comes, as above, from the pure
> > checkpoint-a-whole-container-only view.  So long as you will
> > checkpoint/restore a whole container, then you'll end up doing
> > something requiring privilege anyway.  But that is not all of
> > the use cases.
> 
> Yeah, there are certainly a lot of shades of gray here.  I've been
> talking to some HPC guys in the last couple of days.  They certainly
> have a need for checkpoint/restart, but much less of a need for doing
> entire containers.  

We'd be uncomfortable running partial checkpoints. We'd much rather have
slurm spawn off a container and just checkpoint that. Who knows what
users code spawns off other processes...

Kevin

> 
> It also occurs to me that we have the potential to pull some
> long-out-of-tree users back in.  VMADump users, for instance:
> 
> 	http://bproc.sourceforge.net/c268.html
> 
> If we could do *just* a selective checkpoint of a single process's VMAs,
> the bproc users could probably use sys_checkpoint() in some way.  That's
> *way* less than an entire container, but it would be really useful to
> some people.   
> 
> -- Dave
> 
> _______________________________________________
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