[Devel] Re: [LPC] Notes from Checkpoint/Restart BOF

Mon Oct 12 11:52:38 PDT 2009

Hi,

Thanks for posting the notes. I place a (modified) summary of the BOF
on the linux-c/r wiki:

	http://ckpt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LPC2009

Oren.

Sukadev Bhattiprolu wrote:
> 
> Notes from Checkpoint/Restart BOF at Linux Plumbers Conference, Sep 24, 2009.
> 
> (I am missing some details and couple of names. They said they were on
> Containers mailing list though. If you have any other topics that we
> discussed or have any details, please add to this mail).
> 
> ---
> 
> Attendees:
> 	Oren Laadan, Joeseph Ruscio, <One more person> (Librato)
> 	Pavel Emelyanov, <One more person ?> (OpenVZ)
> 	Ying Han, Salman Qazi (Google)
> 	Dan Smith, Matt Helsley, Sukadev Bhattiprolu (IBM)
> 
> 1. Pavel: A few months ago there were discussions about making a "dry-run"
>    to see if checkpoint of an application will succeed. What is the
>    current status of that ?
> 
> 	The answer was there is no dry-run - user should just try the
> 	actual C/R. If application is using an uncheckpointable resource
> 	the C/R will fail cleanly without side-effects. 
> 	The dry-run may not mean anything unless we freeze the application
> 	during the check and leave it frozen until the checkpoint is done.
> 	IOW, the dry-run does not guarantee that application is checkpointable
> 	unless the application is frozen.
> 
> 2. Pavel: Alexey Dobriyan had earlier submitted some code for leak-detection. Do
>    we still have that ?
> 
>    	The answer was that most of the code was used and we also added reverse
> 	detection.
> 
> 3. Do we have a config-option to make a process checkpointable.
> 
> 	<Missed the context of this question> We have CONFIG_CHECKPOINT.
> 
> 4 Checkpointing network connections:
> 
> 	We quickly reviewed the status (AF_UNIX done, AF_INET done in a
> 	prototype and needs to be forward ported). Checkpoint of one-end
> 	of a network connection can cause the connection to be reset.
> 
> 5. Briefly discussed distinction between Live migration and static migration
> 
> 6. Do we need a pre-check during restart to ensure that the application can
>    be restarted ? Eg: if the application used a specific math co-processor
>    or futex at checkpoint and that resource is not available at restart,
>    the restart may encounter some undefined behavior. Should we encode the
>    hardware/OS capabilities in the checkpoint image and check these
>    capabilities during restart (before actual restart). Reason for this
>    check being the restart may not fail cleanly if the resource is missing.
> 
>    	Conclusion was that there could be too many such capabilities that
> 	we would have to track and even so there may be some unexpected
> 	difference between checkpoint machine and restart machine.
> 
> 	For now, let the restart fail and/or deal with in user-space.
> 
> 7. Discussed briefly about clone2() aka clone_with_pids().
> 
> 	Everyone seemed to agree that restoring process-tree even in user-space
> 	will work and can be used.
> 
> 8. Oren: Error reporting during restart
> 
> 	We currently fail the system call with an error code and if we ant
> 	more information on the failure, we have to add debug messages to
> 	the code. We discussed couple of options for error reporting on restart:
> 		- log detailed message(s) to console (risk wrapping dmesg buf)
> 		- pass an extra-buffer to the system call and have kernel
> 		  fill-in more detailed error message (would need two new
> 		  parameters, one pointer to the buf, one size of the buf).
> 
> 		- Pass-in an extra 'log_fd' parameter to system call and have
> 		kernel write detailed messags to that log_fd (unless log_fd
> 		is -1). This seemed more flexible than the other two.
> 
> 		We agreed that the format of the log messages can be free-format
> 		and that there is no guarantee that the format of the log
> 		messages will not change.
> 
> 		But it was not clear (at least to me) if the log file should
> 		contain all log messages relating to the C/R or just the
> 		last (few) error messages.
> 
> 9. Any application to summarize the checkpoint ?
> 
> 	We have a 'ckptinfo' that could summarize the contents of a checkpoint.
> 
> 10. Ying Han: Is there a performance difference between the original instance
>     of the application and the restarted instance ? (Eg: on NUMA if application
>     was on one node at checkpoint and after restart, ended up on another node).
> 
>     	Not sure if there was a conclusion to this point.
> 
> 11. Discussed that devices like tty, /dev/rtc etc must be virtualized before
>     we can checkpoint them.
> 
> 12. Oren: Checkpointing/Restoring mount namespaces
> 
> 	Bind mounts are restored in container.
> 
> 	NFS: at least on OpenVZ, since network is frozen, reopening files over
> 	NFS is not possible until restart is complete. OpenVZ creates fake
> 	dentries to allow the open to proceed.
> 
> 	Loopback devices - cannot open them in a container since they can
> 		lockup system with huge memory footprint ??
> 
> 	We should disable shared-mount propogation at least for now.
> 
> 13. Oren: cradvise()
> 
> 	Use a single system call to optimize the checkpoint/restart ?
> 	Eg: If an fd refers to /dev/tty1 in the checkpoint-image and that tty
> 	is not available on restart, user-space could open another tty and
> 	teach the kernel to use a different tty, /dev/tty2, during
> 	restart. Another example is if an application has several megs of
> 	"scratch" memory  that does not need to checkpointed, they could
> 	use 'cradvise') system call to optimize the checkpoint or restart.
> 
> 	The conclusion was it would be hard to get acceptance from community,
> 	for a new variant of ioctl/fcntl call. So, we should instead try to
> 	add the necessary features to existing system calls like fcntl(),
> 	shmctl() or madvise().
> 
> 14. Oren: Unlinked files/directories
> 
> 	May need to copy the contents of the deleted file to the
> 	checkpoint image (only on ext4?). Create a fake hard link to the
> 	file so the file still exists in the filesystem snapshot and remove
> 	the link during restart.
> 
> 	There is a good paper discussing snapshot/restore of unlinked files
> 	on Xen. The same concept could be used in C/R too ?
> 
> 	(If you have links to the paper, please add)
> 
> 15. Network namespaces
> 
> 	Restore namespaces in user-space, restore sockets in-kernel.
> 
> 	Cannot create devices in user-space unless we know the index for
> 	the network device ?
> 
> 	(Missed details on this discussion)
> 
> 16. Time
> 
> 	Will need some policies on restart like:
> 		- use absolute time or relative time
> 		- do new children inherit the policy ?
> 		- do we gradually adjust from relative to absolute time ?
> 
> 	If not cradvise(), maybe timectl() :-p
> 
> 17. VDSO
> 
> 	(Missed details on this discussion)
> 
> 18. Async I/O
> 
> 	Getting a lockdep report during checkpoint ?
> 	OpenVZ flushes I/O, waits for pending I/O and then retries checkpoint
> 	We may need to the do the same for mmap I/O ?
> 
> 19. Checkpoint data structures:
> 
> 	- Try to keep extensions to existing data structures minimal
> 	- If necessary, add to end of data structures
> 	- But do not get locked down to an ABI at this point. i.e.  even after
> 	  entering mainline, format of checkpoint image may change for a while
> 	  before stabilizing.
> 
> 20. Test suite:
> 
> 	OpenVZ has some test cases that has various applications go to specific
> 	states and wait for a checkpoint. After that and after restart they
> 	check that nothing has changed unexpectedly.
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