3 ms·

A few decades back we had the ability to cryogenically freeze processes, save them to storage, move the bins to another system, and defrost them to be run again

by aa-jv 2y ago

A few decades back we had the ability to cryogenically freeze processes, save them to storage, move the bins to another system, and defrost them to be run again. This was a great feature that I had hoped would make its way into mainstream kernels, but it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I wonder if the expansion of process isolation tooling will ever lead us back to this situation again, anyone know? It seems to me that strict isolation would be a vital rudimentary requirement for cryofreezing processes...

losfair 2y ago
You might be looking for CRIU (https://criu.org/ https://criu.org/) - it works perfectly on the current kernel.
- bjackman 2y ago
  IIUC this even has logic to reconstitute TCP connections - https://criu.org/TCP_connection https://criu.org/TCP_connection
mfashby 2y ago
Yeah there is some capability for this, for example https://criu.org https://criu.org
yamrzou 2y ago
A bit of tangent, but reminds me of the Deep Freeze Windows app: https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze I wonder if a similar tool exists for Linux.
- q2dg 2y ago
  Guest user account??
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  It would be easy enough using an overlay file system, but I'm not aware of anybody having nicely packaged it up.
shanemhansen 2y ago
Well at the VM level live migration and vmotion have been around for a while. I've watched a VM get migrated while ping is running without missing a single packet. CRIU is used lots of places for Linux processes but in my experience is far more low level and finicky and it tends to do things that require root permissions. It's used in production, but I would be shocked if, for example, someone made it so k8s could just live migrate any pod with CRIU. Just think of the possible ways apps that might break if you changed their hostname or pid out from under them. And that's not even including stuff like connections to localhost or shared memory.

by aa-jv 2y ago

losfair 2y ago

You might be looking for CRIU (https://criu.org/ https://criu.org/) - it works perfectly on the current kernel.

bjackman 2y ago
IIUC this even has logic to reconstitute TCP connections - https://criu.org/TCP_connection https://criu.org/TCP_connection

mfashby 2y ago

Yeah there is some capability for this, for example https://criu.org https://criu.org

yamrzou 2y ago

A bit of tangent, but reminds me of the Deep Freeze Windows app: https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze I wonder if a similar tool exists for Linux.

q2dg 2y ago
Guest user account??
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
It would be easy enough using an overlay file system, but I'm not aware of anybody having nicely packaged it up.

shanemhansen 2y ago

Well at the VM level live migration and vmotion have been around for a while. I've watched a VM get migrated while ping is running without missing a single packet. CRIU is used lots of places for Linux processes but in my experience is far more low level and finicky and it tends to do things that require root permissions. It's used in production, but I would be shocked if, for example, someone made it so k8s could just live migrate any pod with CRIU. Just think of the possible ways apps that might break if you changed their hostname or pid out from under them. And that's not even including stuff like connections to localhost or shared memory.