[libvirt] Re: kernel summit topic - 'containers end-game'
Quoting Daniel Lezcano (dlezcano(a)fr.ibm.com):
Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
...
Checkpoint:
- The initiator of the checkpoint initialize the barrier and send a
signal SIGCKPT to all the checkpointable tasks and these ones will jump
on the handler and block on the barrier.
- When all these tasks reach this barrier, the initiator of the
checkpoint dumps the system wide resources (memory, sysv ipc, struct
files, etc ...).
- When this is done, the tasks are released and they store their
process wide resources (semundo, file descriptor, etc ...) to a
current->ckpt_restart buffer and then set the status of the operation
and block on the barrier.
- The initiator of the checkpoint then collects all these informations
and dump them.
Do you envision all of the dumping being done in kernel or by userspace?
...
- Finally the initiator of the checkpoint release the tasks.
Restart:
- The user executes the statefile, that spawns the process tree and all
the processes are blocked in the barrier.
- The initiator of the restart restore the system wide resources
and fill the restarted processes' current->ckpt_restart buffer.
Same question about restore...
- The initiator sends a SIGRESTART to all the tasks and unblock the
tasks
- all the tasks restore their process wide resources regarding the
current->ckpt_restart buffer.
- all the tasks write their status and block on the barrier
- the initiator of the restart release the tasks which will return to
their execution context when they were checkpointed.
This approach is different of you are doing but I am pretty sure most of
the code is re-usable. I see different advantages of this approach:
- because the process resources are checkpointed / restarted from
current, it would be easy to reuse some syscalls code (from the kernel
POV) and that would reduce the code duplication and maintenance overhead.
- the approach is more fine grained as we can implement piece by piece
the checkpoint / restart.
- as the statefile is in the elf format, gdb could be used to debug a
statefile as a core file
Note btw that Dave has found that a checkpoint is faster than a core-dump
at the moment :) That's not entirely an aside - I need to reread your
email a few times and really process your suggestion, but given that some
users want to dump hundreds of gigabytes of memory, not slowing down the
checkpoint is a big consideration.
- as each process checkpoint / restart themselves, most of the
execution context is stored in the stack which is CR with the memory, so
when returning from the signal handler, the process returns to the right
context. That is less complicated and more generic than externally
checkpoint the execution context of a frozen task which would be
potentially different for the restart.
I hope Serge you can present this approach as an alternative of the
current patchset __if__ this one is not acceptable.
I'll try to understand it better than I do right now - I don't think
it's for discussing at ksummit, but definately if we have a mini-summit
or during the next round of discussions (during or immediately after
the ckpt-v17 publish).
thanks,
-serge