From: Nathan Lynch <ntl@pobox•com>
To: Oren Laadan <orenl@cs•columbia.edu>
Cc: containers@lists•osdl.org, linuxppc-dev@ozlabs•org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] powerpc: bare minimum checkpoint/restart implementation
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:37:45 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20090316133745.4f636979@thinkcentre.lan> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <49B9D37A.1070503@cs.columbia.edu>
Oren Laadan <orenl@cs•columbia.edu> wrote:
>
> Nathan Lynch wrote:
> > Nathan Lynch <ntl@pobox•com> wrote:
> >> Oren Laadan wrote:
> >>> Nathan Lynch wrote:
> >>>> What doesn't work:
> >>>> * restarting a 32-bit task from a 64-bit task and vice versa
> >>> Is there a test to bail if we attempt to checkpoint such tasks ?
> >> No, but I'll add one if it looks too hard to fix for the next round.
> >
> > Unfortunately, adding a check for this is hard.
> >
> > The "point of no return" in the restart path is cr_read_mm, which tears
> > down current's address space. cr_read_mm runs way before cr_read_cpu,
> > which is the only restart method I've implemented for powerpc so far.
> > So, checking for this condition in cr_read_cpu is too late if I want
> > restart(2) to return an error and leave the caller's memory map
> > intact. (And I do want this: restart should be as robust as execve.)
>
> In the case of restarting a container, I think it's ok if a restarting
> tasks dies in an "ugly" way -- this will be observed and handled by the
> initiating task outside the container, which will gracefully report to
> the caller/user.
How would task exit be observed? Are all tasks in a restarted
container guaranteed to be children (in the sense that wait(2) would
work) of the initiating task?
> Even if you close this hole, then any other failure later on during
> restart - even a failure to allocate kernel memory due to memory pressure,
> will give that undesired effect that you are trying to avoid.
Kernel memory allocation failure is not the kind of problem I'm trying
to address. I am trying to address the case of restarting a checkpoint
image that needs features that are not present, where the set of
features used by the checkpoint image can be compared against the set
of features the platform provides.
> That said, any difference in the architecture that may cause restart to
> fail is probably best placed in cr_write_head_arch.
I think I explained in my earlier mail why the current implementation's
cr_write_head_arch doesn't help in this case:
> > Well okay then, cr_read_head_arch seems to be the right place in the
> > restart sequence for the architecture code to handle this. However,
> > cr_write_head_arch (which produces the buffer that cr_read_head_arch
> > consumes) is not provided a reference to the task to be checkpointed,
> > nor can it assume that it's operating on current. I need a reference
> > to a task before I can determine whether it's running in 32- or 64-bit
> > mode, or using the FPU, Altivec, SPE, whatever.
> >
> > In any case, mixing 32- and 64-bit tasks across restart is something I
> > eventually want to support, not reject. But the problem I've outlined
> > applies to FPU state and vector extensions (VMX, SPE), as well as
> > sanity-checking debug register (DABR) contents. We'll need to be able
> > to error out gracefully from restart when a checkpoint image specifies a
> > feature unsupported by the current kernel or hardware. But I don't see
> > how to do it with the current architecture. Am I missing something?
> >
>
> More specifically, I envision restart to work like this:
>
> 1) user invokes user-land utility (e.g. "cr --restart ..."
> 2) 'cr' will create a new container
> 3) 'cr' will start a child in that container
> 4) child will create rest of tree (in kernel or in user space - tbd)
> 5) each task in that tree will restore itself
> 6) 'cr' monitors this process
> 7) if all goes well - 'cr' report ok.
> 8) if something goes bad, 'cr' notices and notifies caller/user
Again, how would 'cr' obtain exit status for these tasks, and how would
it distinguish failure from normal operation?
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-03-16 18:37 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 28+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-01-28 22:41 [RFC/PATCH 0/3] checkpoint/restart for powerpc Nathan Lynch
2009-01-28 22:41 ` [PATCH 1/3] powerpc: bare minimum checkpoint/restart implementation Nathan Lynch
2009-01-29 6:41 ` Oren Laadan
2009-01-29 21:40 ` Nathan Lynch
2009-01-30 0:11 ` Oren Laadan
2009-01-30 20:25 ` Nathan Lynch
2009-02-17 7:03 ` Nathan Lynch
2009-02-17 20:02 ` [PATCH 1/3 v2] powerpc: heckpoint/restart implementation Nathan Lynch
2009-02-24 19:58 ` [PATCH 1/3] powerpc: bare minimum checkpoint/restart implementation Serge E. Hallyn
2009-02-24 21:11 ` Nathan Lynch
2009-03-13 3:36 ` Oren Laadan
2009-03-13 3:31 ` Oren Laadan
2009-03-13 15:42 ` Cedric Le Goater
2009-03-16 18:37 ` Nathan Lynch [this message]
2009-03-17 6:55 ` Cedric Le Goater
2009-03-18 9:15 ` Oren Laadan
2009-01-30 4:01 ` Serge E. Hallyn
2009-01-30 3:55 ` Serge E. Hallyn
2009-02-04 3:39 ` Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2009-02-04 15:54 ` Serge E. Hallyn
2009-02-04 20:58 ` Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2009-02-04 23:44 ` Oren Laadan
2009-02-05 0:16 ` Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2009-02-05 3:30 ` Oren Laadan
2009-02-05 16:09 ` Serge E. Hallyn
2009-02-05 21:01 ` Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2009-01-28 22:41 ` [PATCH 2/3] powerpc: wire up checkpoint and restart syscalls Nathan Lynch
2009-01-28 22:41 ` [PATCH 3/3] allow checkpoint/restart on powerpc Nathan Lynch
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