Installation

criu is an utility to checkpoint/restore a process tree. This page describes how to manually build and install prerequisites and the tool itself.

Installing from packages

Some distributions provide ready-to-use packages. If no, or the CRIU version you want is not yet there, you will need to get CRIU sources and compile it.

Obtaining CRIU Source

You can download the source code as a release tarball or sync the git repository. If you plan to modify CRIU sources the latter way is highly recommended.

Getting source tarball

Tarball:	criu-4.0.tar.gz
Version:	4.0 "CRIUDA"
Released:	20 Sep 2024
GIT tag:	v4.0

Cloning git repository

git clone https://github.com/xemul/criu

Dependencies

Compiler and C Library

CRIU is mostly written in C and the build system is based on Makefiles. Thus just install standard gcc and make sets.

Some additional steps are required if you're using Debian.

• For native compilation on Debian based systems, install the build-essential package.
• On a modern Debian based x86_64 you will need to install the lib32stdc++6 and lib32z1 packages.

For cross compiling for ARM and AArch64, the Linaro prebuilt toolchains are a good choice. Installing them is described below. They are ia32 architecture binaries.

mkdir -p deps/`uname -m`-linux-gnu
cd deps
wget http://releases.linaro.org/14.09/components/toolchain/binaries/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.9-2014.09_linux.tar.xz
tar --strip=1 -C `uname -m`-linux-gnu -xf gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.9-2014.09_linux.tar.xz
wget http://releases.linaro.org/14.09/components/toolchain/binaries/gcc-linaro-aarch64-linux-gnu-4.9-2014.09_linux.tar.xz
tar --strip=1 -C `uname -m`-linux-gnu -xf gcc-linaro-aarch64-linux-gnu-4.9-2014.09_linux.tar.xz
cd ..

Protocol Buffers

CRIU uses the Google Protocol Buffers to read and write images and thus requires C language bindings. The protoc tool is required at build time and the libprotobuf-c.so is required at build and run time. CRIT also uses python language bindings for protocol buffers and requires the descriptor.proto file from devel set that can be typically found in the protobuf-devel package.

Distribution Packages

The easiest way is to install distribution packages.

• RPM package names
  • protobuf
  • protobuf-c
  • protobuf-python
  • protobuf-compiler
  • protobuf-devel
  • protobuf-c-devel
• Debian package names
  • protobuf-c-compiler
  • libprotobuf-c0-dev
  • protobuf-compiler
  • protobuf-python

Building Protocol Buffers From Source

If you would like to build from source, you can use the following commands to obtain the source code repositories, configure, and build the code. On a Debian based system, you may have to do autoconf curl g++ libtool first.

To build protobuf

cd deps
git clone https://github.com/google/protobuf.git protobuf
cd protobuf
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu
make
make install
cd ../..

To build protobuf-c

cd deps
git clone https://github.com/protobuf-c/protobuf-c.git protobuf-c
cd protobuf-c
./autogen.sh
mkdir ../pbc-`uname -m`
cd ../pbc-`uname -m`
../protobuf-c/configure --prefix=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu \
  PKG_CONFIG_PATH=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/lib/pkgconfig
make
make install
cd ../..

To cross-compile for ARM some more tricks will be required.

For ARMv7

cd deps
mkdir -p pbc-arm
cd pbc-arm
../protobuf-c/configure --host=arm-linux-gnueabihf --prefix=`pwd`/../arm-linux-gnueabihf --disable-protoc PATH=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH
make PATH=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH
make install PATH=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH
cd ../..

For ARM8

cd deps
mkdir -p pbc-aarch64
cd pbc-aarch64
 ../protobuf-c/configure --host=aarch64-linux-gnu --prefix=`pwd`/../aarch64-linux-gnu --disable-protoc PATH=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH
make PATH=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH
make install PATH=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH
cd ../..

Other deps

• python-ipaddr is used by CRIT to pretty-print ip.
• If libbsd available, CRIU will be compiled with setproctitle() support. It will allow to make process titles of service workers to be more verbose.
• The iproute2 tool version 3.5.0 or higher is needed for dumping network namespaces. The latest one can be cloned from iproute2. It should be compiled and a path to ip written in the environment variable CR_IP_TOOL.

Linux Kernel

Linux kernel v3.11 or newer is required, with some specific options set. If your distribution does not provide needed kernel, you might want to compile one yourself.

Configuring the kernel

Most likely the first thing to enable is the CONFIG_EXPERT=y (General setup -> Configure standard kernel features (expert users)) option, which on x86_64 depends on the CONFIG_EMBEDDED=y (General setup -> Embedded system) one (welcome to Kconfig reverse chains hell).

The following options must be enabled for CRIU to work:

• General setup options
  • CONFIG_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE=y (Checkpoint/restore support)
  • CONFIG_NAMESPACES=y (Namespaces support)
  • CONFIG_UTS_NS=y (Namespaces support -> UTS namespace)
  • CONFIG_IPC_NS=y (Namespaces support -> IPC namespace)
  • CONFIG_PID_NS=y (Namespaces support -> PID namespaces)
  • CONFIG_NET_NS=y (Namespaces support -> Network namespace)
  • CONFIG_FHANDLE=y (Open by fhandle syscalls)
  • CONFIG_EVENTFD=y (Enable eventfd() system call)
  • CONFIG_EPOLL=y (Enable eventpoll support)
• Networking support -> Networking options options for sock-diag subsystem
  • CONFIG_UNIX_DIAG=y (Unix domain sockets -> UNIX: socket monitoring interface)
  • CONFIG_INET_DIAG=y (TCP/IP networking -> INET: socket monitoring interface)
  • CONFIG_INET_UDP_DIAG=y (TCP/IP networking -> INET: socket monitoring interface -> UDP: socket monitoring interface)
  • CONFIG_PACKET_DIAG=y (Packet socket -> Packet: sockets monitoring interface)
  • CONFIG_NETLINK_DIAG=y (Netlink socket -> Netlink: sockets monitoring interface)
• Other options
  • CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER=y (File systems -> Inotify support for userspace)
  • CONFIG_IA32_EMULATION=y (x86 only) (Executable file formats -> Emulations -> IA32 Emulation)

For some usage scenarios there is an ability to track memory changes and produce incremental dumps. Need to enable the CONFIG_MEM_SOFT_DIRTY=y (optional) (Processor type and features -> Track memory changes).

Note we also have our custom kernel, which might contain some experimental CRIU related patches.

Building CRIU From Source

Native Compilation

Simply run make in the CRIU source directory.

Compilation in Docker container

There's a docker-build target in Makefile which builds CRIU in Ubuntu Docker container. Just run make docker-build and that's it.

Compilation with non-standard paths to dependencies

Here is an example of building natively specifying manually built dependencies.

cd deps
rsync -a --exclude=.git --exclude=deps .. criu-`uname -m`
cd criu-`uname -m`
make \
  USERCFLAGS="-I`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/include -L`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/lib" \
  PATH="`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH"
sudo LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/lib ./criu check
cd ../..

Cross Compilation for ARM

ARMv7

cd deps
rsync -a --exclude=.git --exclude=deps .. criu-arm
cd criu-arm
make \
  ARCH=arm \
  CROSS_COMPILE=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf- \
  USERCFLAGS="-I`pwd`/../arm-linux-gnueabihf/include -L`pwd`/../arm-linux-gnueabihf/lib" \
  PATH="`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH"
cd ../..

ARMv8

 cd deps
 rsync -a --exclude=.git --exclude=deps .. criu-aarch64
 cd criu-aarch64
 make \
  ARCH=aarch64 \
  CROSS_COMPILE=`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin/aarch64-linux-gnu- \
  USERCFLAGS="-I`pwd`/../aarch64-linux-gnu/include -L`pwd`/../aarch64-linux-gnu/lib" \
  PATH="`pwd`/../`uname -m`-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH"
 cd ../..

Installation

CRIU works perfectly even when run from the sources directory (with the "./criu" command), but if you want to have in standard paths run make install

Checking That It Works

First thing to do is to run criu check --ms.

At the end it should say "Looks OK", if it doesn't the messages on the screen explain what functionality is missing. If you're using our custom kernel, then the --ms option should not be used, in this case CRIU would check for all the kernel features to work.

You can then try running the ZDTM Test Suite which sits in the tests/zdtm/ directory.

Further reading

Please see Usage and Advanced usage, as well as Category:HOWTO.