Subject: Re: [boost] Persistency library
From: Oliver Kowalke (oliver.kowalke_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-09-25 16:53:12


Am 25.09.2011 22:18, schrieb Lifshitz, Yair:
> From: Edward Diener<eldiener_at_[hidden]>
>
>> On 9/24/2011 10:31 AM, Lifshitz, Yair wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Object-based persistency/serialization libraries often require significant modifications to the code.
>>> Would Boost consider adding a process-level checkpointing library to boost?
>> Why not explain what you mean by a "process-level checkpointing library"
>> and then others can comment if they might find it useful ?
> Process-level checkpointing is an approach where an entire process' memory image is dumped in binary format.
> The checkpointing library does not require any understanding of the saved application - it works by traversing
> the entire memory image and directly dumping that to disk.
>
> On Linux for example, this can be done by traversing all memory segments described in /proc/self/maps.
>
> This approach is highly robust, and generally considered good for very large applications where
> serialization is a challenge.
>
> Some examples can be seen here - http://checkpointing.org/ - though we had little luck with most of them when
> starting to work on persistency (~6 years ago).
>
I assume resuming from a checkpoint would also require to restore the
registers, flags, stack (pointer), instruction pointer etc. - I'd like
to know if your lib supports only intel or some other architectures too.

Oliver