[CRIU] Help dumping and restoring a process

[Adrian Reber]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 03:53:05AM +0000, Jose Atiles wrote:
> Hi, thanks for your replies.
> 
> I have attempted to dump/checkpoint the following programs in Linux Mint 19 Matte:
> Calculator, XED text pad, Firefox latest version, TuxPuck pong game.
> All those were simply "test runs", as my target is to run a windows game application through Wine,
> or even an Emulator like Citra. Either way, single player, non online games/apps.
> 
> I'm using CRIU 3.6-2.
> 
> Since Radostin suggested running the application with a container like docker, I have been researching that approach. There seems to be a bug in the current Docker version, that breaks CRIU checkpoint ability.
> This is based on the following article. There the author describes a workaround by installing an old version of Docker; sadly I'm still waiting a reply, because I can not reproduce the steps he describes.
> https://technology.amis.nl/2018/04/08/first-steps-with-docker-checkpoint-to-create-and-restore-snapshots-of-running-containers/#comment-9763
> 
> 
> Other sources I've been researching are:
> https://github.com/martynjarvis/wine-nvidia-base
> 
> https://marmelab.com/blog/2018/03/21/using-nvidia-gpu-within-docker-container.html
> 
> https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker
> 
> 
> I went with the Docker approach because vnc seemed a bit more complicated. Is the Docker approach non viable? Is VNC the only alternative?
> <https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker>

The question is not docker or not. One currently existing limitation is
that CRIU cannot checkpoint a process which is using the GPU. Using VNC
is not using the GPU and thus it is possible checkpoint the process
using CRIU. The reason is that CRIU does not know who to extract the
information about the process from the GPU.

This used to be a point where it seemed really unlikely that it might
see a working implementation but there was a CRIU github issue
(https://github.com/checkpoint-restore/criu/issues/534) which sounded
like it might be possible in the future.

		Adrian