Checkpoint/Restore Of Unprivileged Processes Sent In For Linux 5.9

Linux 5.9 is bringing another feature that's long been baking and of interest to a growing number of stakeholders... checkpoint/restore functionality of unprivileged processes.

With Linux 5.9 all the pieces should be in place for allowing checkpoint/restore of processes not running as root. This saving and restoring of processes can be used for functionality like container migration, moving workloads in HPC environments, or for the Java JVM to speed-up startup time. The Linux kernel has supported checkpoint/restore of processes but only as root until now.

The CRIU project for checkpoint/restore in user-space has patches pending for making use of this forthcoming kernel support. For those not familiar with CRIU, "Using this tool, you can freeze a running application (or part of it) and checkpoint it to a hard drive as a collection of files. You can then use the files to restore and run the application from the point it was frozen at. The distinctive feature of the CRIU project is that it is mainly implemented in user space."

This CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE support is on deck for the Linux 5.9 kernel by way of this pull request. It will be interesting to see what more comes of checkpoint/restore capabilities on Linux now that it can be opened up for unprivileged processes.