System and method for hybrid kernel and user-space checkpointing using a character device

摘要

A system, method, and computer readable medium for hybrid kernel-mode and user-mode checkpointing of multi-process applications. The computer readable medium includes computer-executable instructions for execution by a processing system. A multi-process application runs on primary hosts and is checkpointed by a checkpointer comprised of a kernel-mode checkpointer module and one or more user-space interceptors providing barrier synchronization, checkpointing thread, resource flushing, and an application virtualization space. Checkpoints may be written to storage and the application restored from said stored checkpoint at a later time. Checkpointing is transparent to the application and requires no modification to the application, operating system, networking stack or libraries. In an alternate embodiment the kernel-mode checkpointer is built into the kernel.

主权项

1. A system, comprising:
computer system memory comprising one or more memory locations configured to store one or more multi-process applications; one or more Central Processing Units (CPUs) operatively connected to said computer system memory and configured to execute said one or more multi-process applications on a host with a host operating system; a checkpointer comprising a user-space checkpointer and a kernel-space checkpointer, and configured to generate checkpoints of said one or more multi-process applications; and computer system memory and computer system storage configured to store said checkpoints; wherein said user-space checkpointer is comprised of one or more user-space interceptors preloaded into an address space of each application process, wherein said user-space interceptors comprise at least one of a barrier, creation of a per-process checkpointing thread, and an application virtualization space providing a private resource name space; wherein said kernel-space checkpointer is called while the execution of application processes are halted at said user-space barrier wherein said kernel-space checkpointer is implemented as a character device; wherein a read function of said character device skips memory pages not used by said application process; wherein the read function of said character device includes memory pages used by said application process; wherein said character device moves a device pointer forward to a next page after a read operation; and wherein the character device read function calls are optimized by a skip of one or more of reserved low memory, reserved high memory, or memory reserved for the operating system.