Google Summer of Code 2019
This page lists accepted projects that were completed during Google Summer of Code 2019. For the list of ideas go here.
Student final submissions[edit]
Abhishek Dubey - Optimize the pre-dump algorithm[edit]
Final report: https://dubeyabhishek.github.io/GSoC19CRIU/
Summary: Optimize the pre-dump algorithm to avoid pinning to many memory in RAM
Current pre-dump mode is used to write task memory contents into image files w/o stopping the task for too long. It does this by stopping the task, infecting it and draining all the memory into a set of pipes. Then the task is cured, resumed and the pipes' contents is written into images (maybe a page server). Unfortunately, this approach creates a big stress on the memory subsystem, as keeping all memory in pipes creates a lot of unreclaimable memory (pages in pipes are not swappable), as well as the number of pipes themselves can be huge, as one pipe doesn't store more than a fixed amount of data (see pipe(7) man page).
A solution for this problem is to use a sys_read_process_vm() syscall, which will mitigate all of the above. To do this we need to allocate a temporary buffer in criu, then walk the target process vm by copying the memory piece-by-piece into it, then flush the data into image (or page server), and repeat.
Ideally there should be sys_splice_process_vm() syscall in the kernel, that does the same as the read_process_vm does, but vmsplices the data
Links:
- Memory pre dump
- https://github.com/checkpoint-restore/criu/issues/351
- Memory dumping and restoring, Memory changes tracking
- process_vm_readv(2) vmsplice(2) RFC for splice_process_vm syscall
Details:
- Skill level: advanced
- Language: C
- Mentor: Pavel Emelianov <xemul@virtuozzo.com>
- Suggested by: Pavel Emelianov <xemul@virtuozzo.com>