Call for Discussion: New Project: CRaC

[Anton Kozlov]

Hi,

It's been a while since we presented Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint for the
first time [0].  We are still committed to the idea and researching this topic.

Java applications can avoid the long start-up and warm-up by saving the state
of the Java runtime (snapshot, checkpoint).  The saved state is then used to
start instances fast (restored).  But after the state was saved, the execution
environment could change.  Also, if multiple instances are started from the
saved state simultaneously, they should obtain some uniqueness, and their
executions should diverge at some point.

We believe that the practical way to solve these problems is to make Java
applications aware of when the state is saved and restored.  Then an
application will be able to handle environmental changes.  The application will
also be able to obtain uniqueness from the environment.

The CRaC project aims to research Java API for coordination between application
and runtime to save and restore the state.  Runtime should support multiple
ways to save the state: virtual machine snapshot, container snapshot, CRIU
project on Linux, etc.  We hope to come with an API that is general enough for
any underlying mechanism.  We also plan to explore safety checks in the API and
runtime, which prevent saving the state if it may not be restored or work
correctly after the restore.

I propose myself as a Project Lead of the CRaC Project.  If you're interested
or want to be the committer, please drop me a message.

A fork of JDK [1] would be a starting point of this project.

Thanks,
Anton

[0] https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2020-September/005594.html
[1] https://github.com/CRaC/jdk