Proposed F19 Feature: Checkpoint/Restore

[Jaroslav Reznik]

= Features/Checkpoint Restore =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Checkpoint_Restore

Feature owner(s): Adrian Reber

Add support to checkpoint and restore processes. Checkpointing processes can 
be used for fault tolerance and/or load balancing.

Checkpointing a process in regular intervals can help to restart a process if 
it might crash to resume/restart/restore the calculation without too much data 
lost. Providing this ability transparent at the OS level removes the need to 
implement this functionality for all processes manually.

Checkpointing and restoring a process to another system can be used to migrate 
a process, process tree or container to another system to distribute the load 
during the runtime and also for maintenance without service interruption like 
it is possible with virtual machines.

== Detailed description ==
Checkpointing/restore, as mentioned above, can be used for fault tolerance and 
load distribution.

Fedora can offer checkpoint/restore by using CRIU (Checkpoint/Restore In 
Userspace). CRIU has been developed with the goal to be accepted by upstream 
and most patches necessary have already been accepted (as of 2012-10-24) in 
the kernel. The current release (0.3) of the userspace tools (crtools) offers 
the ability to checkpoint/restore containers and thus offering the ability to 
migrate containers.

To offer the checkpoint/restore functionality the package crtools has been 
imported into Fedora and changes are still necessary to the kernel RPM.