; Summary: Implement process checkpointing for Android

; Proposer: Tim Bird

== Description ==
Process checkpointing allows a system to take a snapshot of a
running process (similar to a coredump).  This snapshot can
then be restarted later, or on a different machine.
To achieve this, file descriptors, process IDs and other
OS-provided or managed resources (such as IPC connections)
need to be virtualized.

It might be useful to checkpoint and restart various parts
of an Android system.  While Dalvik-based applications have
"re-startability" built into their application lifecycle, other
native applications (such as Zygote or the service manager)
do not.

Providing process checkpointing for these native processes
would provide for the possibility to recover from faults
by restoring the processes from their snapshot images and
resuming from the checkpoint.  This could improve the fault
tolerance of Android-based systems.

Also, it would be worth investigating whether this technology
could be used to reduce the startup time for certain time-consuming
native components of Android, to improve overall bootup time.

== Related work ==
* See http://lwn.net/Articles/412749/ - article about checkpointing feature 
described by Oren Laadan at the Linux kernel summit
* [http://www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/research/migrate/ Zap: Transparent checkpoint 
and restart research project at Columbia University]

== Scope ==
unknown

== Contractor Candidates ==
unknown

== Comments ==


[[Category:Project proposals 2011]]

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment
=============================

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