Storing entire process state on disk and restoring it later? (On Linux/Unix)

process state store restore disk
Marco Aurélio picture Marco Aurélio · Apr 18, 2011 · Viewed 7.2k times · Source

I would like to know: Is there a system call, library, kernel module or command line tool I can use to store the complete state of a running program on the disk?

That is: I would like to completely dump the memory, page layout, stack, registers, threads and file descriptors a process is currently using to a file on the hard drive and be able to restore it later seamlessly, just like an emulator "savestate" or a Virtual Machine "snapshot".

I would also like, if possible, to have multiple "backup copies" of the program state, so I can revert to a previous execution point if the program dies for some reason.

Is this possible?

Answer

ergosys picture ergosys · Apr 18, 2011

Something like this? You can also check out the checkpointing page on wikipedia.

Related questions

Find (and kill) process locking port 3000 on Mac

How do I find (and kill) processes that listen to/use my tcp ports? I'm on mac os x. Sometimes, after a crash or some bug, my rails app is locking port 3000. I can't find it using ps -ef... When …

Read More
How can I measure the actual memory usage of an application or process?

This question is covered here in great detail. How do you measure the memory usage of an application or process in Linux? From the blog article of Understanding memory usage on Linux, ps is not an accurate tool to use …

Read More
What is the difference between a process and a thread?

What is the technical difference between a process and a thread? I get the feeling a word like 'process' is overused and there are also hardware and software threads. How about light-weight processes in languages like Erlang? Is there a …

Read More