Todo

This list is being transformed into the github issues @ https://github.com/xemul/criu/issues

component	task	complexity	potential/willing assignee	comments
crtools/crit	Library/API to access pagemap+page images	medium	-	The memory dumps are quite sophisticated. It would be nice to have a library or API to access the data in them using some simple API. IOW -- API-ize the page_read.c
crtools	Zombies with threads :)	easy	-	When milti-thread task's leader thread exits task turns into zombie state, but the other threads keep running. Need to support this (zdt test pthread02).
tests	automate process of measurement code coverage	easy	-	It is required to automate process of getting code coverage. We have code coverage results measured in 2012. Would be nice to get up to date results on periodic basis and without manual actions.
crtools	Inherit resources, not restore	medium	-	Sigactions are restored for every task before it fork()-s. Then children check for the sa_action from their image matches to one it got from parent. Need to do the same for rlimits, maybe other resources too.
crtools	Implement restorer v2	hard (v2)	-
crtools	New images format	medium (v2)	-	See what's bad with V1 images
kernel/crtools	Tune the start-time of tasks	medium	-	When we restore tasks their start-time goes forward (since we create the new task effectively). Need to address this somehow, most likely with the time namespace.
crtools	Support chroot-ed mount namespace	medium	-	If the root task lives in another mount namespace and has its root moved (with chroot()) CRIU dump fails with errors about inability to resolve files' paths. This is because CRIU treats the mount namespace's root as the init task's root which should be "/".
crtools	Non-stop memory (first?) pre-dump	medium	-	When reading only the memory we can avoid freezing tasks and draining memory with parasite. There's a system call named "read_process_vm" which can help us accessing the other task's memory. The disadvantage of this approach is the need for additional memory. We may control this behaviour by reading memory in chunks and not allocating to much of additional buffers.
kernel/crtools	Speed up fetching info about tasks	medium	Andrey Vagin	Using proc to get info about tasks is nice but too slow. We have measured that having socket-based engine that would fetch info about tasks from the kernel speeds things up significantly. So Andrey is working on the Task-diag patchset that would implement that.
kernel	Make pipes swappable	hard	-	When pre-dumping memory we pull all the task's memory into pipe with vmsplice and then send it via network splicing the pages into socket. During this period all the memory is effectively pinned as pages in pipe are not swappable.
kernel/crtools	Adjust per-task/-container timers offsets	medium	-	Absolute timers differ on different nodes. When live migrating a task/container this difference may (and will) screw the timers up.
crtools	Shift timers' timeouts according to the actual C-to-R delay	medium	-	If we pause tasks between C and R we, probably, need to adjust timers respectively. "Medium" complexity is because it's unclear what to do, not how.
kernel/crtools	Put call to mmap into VDSO	easy	Cyrill	To put the parasite code into target process we modify its code to call the mmap() system call (and the unmodify it back) and put the parasite into new area. Oleg Nesterov suggests not to patch victim, but to always have one on VDSO.
crtools	Integration with other projects	hard	-	CRIU is not working great by itself. There's alway some specific about what user wants to dump. Integrating CRIU with other projects will make CRIU work at its best.
crtools	Restore tasks into fresh new pid namespace	easy	Kuprieiev Ruslan	When we dumped processes, it can be hard to restore it back, if they didn't live in a pid namespace, due to PIDs conflict. It would be nice to have the ability to ask CRIU to create the pid namespace for those guys and restore them there. A thing to worry about is this new namespace's init task.
crtools	Rollback tree state	medium	-	When we checkpointed process tree with -R option (let them run after checkpoint) we might want to return the tasks into checkpointed state on the same machine. Currently this can only be done by killing the processes and restoring them from scratch. If we could ask CRIU to restore the images into the ready processes that could speed things up, especially if carefully caring about memory changes tracking.
crtools	Restore arbitrary mountpoints tree	hard	-	Linux kernel can construct tricky knows with mount points. We don't support arbitrary configuration of such things, only those that are in active use by software. Need to fix them up.
crtools	Lazy restore using userfaultfd	medium	xemul	It might make sense to restore tasks w/o putting all the memory into respective places. Instead, the VMAs in question can be marked as "lazy" and pages will get filled into them in the background and, upon demand, in the out-of-order manner. The functionality is related to lazy migration and seamless kernel update tasks.
crtools	Lazy migration using userfaultfd	medium	xemul	Lazy migration is when we move all the tasks on another node, but leave theirs memory on the source one. Not to allow tasks read garbage from empty address space we protect all of it as inaccessible. When tasks start reading/writing the mem they got page-fault-ed. With the userfaultfd technology it can be possible to intercept the #PF, pull the page from source node and map it into expected address.
crtools	Speed up logging	medium	Cyrill	Synchronous formatting and writes into log files slow things down. On the other hand turning logs off make it impossible to troubleshoot.
crtools	Sanitize logging messages	hard	-	Currently log messages are printed w/o any logic, it's hard to analize what has happened when CRIU fails. Need to improve that by, e.g. categorizing images and explaining them in more details.
crtools	Optimize kcmp calls	medium	-	CRIU build kcmp trees to find out IDs of such objects as MM, FDT and others. Currently we kcmp all tasks to get the ID, but we can improve that by pre-generating ID based on objects that live on MM, FS, etc. If pre-ID of two tasks matches, then we call kcmp, if not -- objects are different.
crtools	Page transfer filters	medium	-	The page-xfer engine just splices the pages from stealing pipes into socket. Packing or encrypting the data would be nice. Maybe it's purely for P.Haul?
crtools	Modify restored resources run-time in CRIT daemon	medium	-	Sometimes it might make sense to tune the objects from images on restore. E.g. change the IP address of sockets from task above or fix file paths to be "chroot-ed". The best solution seems to be in launching CRIT in daemon mode, telling it what images and how to modify and teaching CRIU to "filter" the pb objects read from images through this daemon.
crtools	TCP socket migration with changed IP	medium	-	It might make sense to migrate a tcp connection on a box with changed IP address _if_ both boxes are NAT-ed to the destination. We will then have to go to NAT box and fix the conntracks in that case and use CRIT images modifucation facilities.
crtools	Applying images	hard (v2)	xemul@ w/ students	Think about ability to take images and apply them to a living task(s). Like it was described in the "rollback" feature above. Another exampl -- repopulate fdtable according to data from image. Yet another use-case -- when doing partial migration (see below) we'll need to modify one part to switch from pipes to sockets. What else? With constant replication of tree state we can do incremental dumps on source node and apply those increments on pre-created replicas on the destination node.
crtools	Partial migration	hard	-	If tasks subtree has connections to the rest of the tree (e.g. with pipes of unix sockets) we try to detect this and refuse the dump. It should be possible to take part of the tree, migrating it somewhere and recreating the mentioned links with some other appropriate IPC channel. E.g. pipes with sockets, shared memory with distributed shared memory and so on.
crtools	Shared objects (mm/fs) support	medium	-	Things created with CLONE_FOO flags are not supported now (exception -- full threads). Now we have the kcmp syscall and can do it. The shared fdtable (CLONE_FILES) is supported, the next candidate is mm sharing, as we do know, that MySQL does so sometimes.
crtools	Smart paths resolution	hard	-	Files can be overmounted. In this case CRIU will refuse the dump saying that file is not alive but inaccessible by its name. Need a way to resolve paths to such. There are two ways: 1. Move mounts, that overlap the desired path temporarily, then open the file, then move the mountpoint back. 2. When creating a new mount pre-open an fd keeping the mountpoint. Later, do accurate path resolve and call openat() on proper mountpoint fd.
kernel/crtools	TCP repair fixes	hard	-	We can dump and restore live TCP connection. There are some issues with it, that should be fixed.
crtools/kernel	NFS mount points support	hard	-	NFS mount points from inside container cannot be easily restored. The thing is -- if we want to restore opened file we will go ahead and call the open system call. If the file in question resides on NFS, the latter might need to go to network to check whether the file actually exists and set up the handle. But if the networking is still not restored this operation would fail and we'll have to fail the whole restore. In order to untie this chicken-and-egg problem we may go in two directions.
kernel	Seamless kernel upgrade	hard	xemul	Briefly — dump tasks (into memory), change the kernel w/ kexec, then restore tasks back. From the tasks and remote client perspective tasks has just stopped and then resumed on the newer kernel. Can be a good complement to the classic live-patching technology.
crtools	Restore arbitrary process tree	hard	-	Need to restore any process tree, which could be created with help PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER and CLONE_PARENT. Processes can share other resources clone(2). Look at session02. The task of resolving the given images into operations we might need to perform seem to be NP (not proven though).
crtools	C/R X applications	hard	Ruslan Kuprieiev	Dump/restore of graphical applications (see about integration). In case of X app part of its state is stored into the X-server. Need the way to fetch this state during dump and put this state back into the server on restore. Requires fixing the X-server software too.
crtools	More detailed RPC fail codes	easy	-	Currently only 3 typical errors are reported(see include/cr-errno.h). Need to extend this set as currently it's hard to understand what has happened w/o analysing CRIU log files.
crtools	Make CRIU work on AArch32 with CONFIG_KUSER_HELPERS=n	medium	cov	CRIU currently fails on AArch32 kernels built with CONFIG_KUSER_HELPERS=n.
kernel	Fix VDSO remapping on non-x86 architectures	medium	Laurent Dufour, cov	However some architectures like PowerPC and ARM are keeping a reference to the VDSO base address to build the signal return stack frame by calling the VDSO sigreturn service. So once the VDSO has been moved, this reference is no more valid and the signal frame built later are not usable.
tests	Run many/all tests in "container"	medium	-	Currently we run zdtm tests one-by-one. It would be nice to run the all in one pseudo-container and C/R them as one big subtree.
tests	Trinity-like (fuzz) testing	hard	-	The existing suite is 99% functionality testing. Need more sophisticated testing -- take a process that has done a random set of actions, C/R one, check that all is OK. The latter is the most complicated thing.
tests/infrastructure	Run tests on patches sent to the mailing lists	medium	Ruslan Kuprieiev	It's quite typical that a set sent to the mailing list fails some tests. Need a robot that would monitor the list, check the patches and send the result back.
crtools	Zombies with threads	medium	-	Support processes with alive threads and a dead leader
crtools	Unix sender address	medium	-	Restore sender addresses for unix socket messages