Call for Discussion: New Project: CRaC

[Anton Kozlov]

Hi Dan,

On 7/28/21 5:23 PM, Dan Heidinga wrote:
> Hi,  I'm a little late to the conversation but wanted to add that the
> Eclipse OpenJ9 project [1] is interested in collaborating in this area
> as well.
> 
> We've been exploring implementing a checkpoint/restore mechanism at
> the JVM level [2] along with the required language-level Lifecycle
> APIs ("hooks") to allow pre-snapshot / post-restore fixups.  Recently,
> we've shifted gears to base our efforts on CRIU as the checkpoint
> mechanism to make faster progress on the hooks support.  There's
> overlap between the various approaches in this space and we see a lot
> of benefit to standardizing the language support for saving/restoring
> state.
> 
> Count us in as interested in engaging in this project.

It's really nice to have you here!

I will be glad to hear how the CRaC API is aligned with what you're doing and
how does it fit your use cases. Although we are rather far from
standardization, the outcome should be, of course, something general and
suitable for other implementations.

The experience of implementing the in-JVM checkpoint/restore mechanism is also
very interesting, as well as its usability. We always considered CRIU as the
simplest bootstrap mechanism with others possible. So the API should require no
changes for the in-JVM mechanism, at least a hypothetical one. It will be
interesting to look at where we are in this sense.

Thanks,
Anton