Checkpoint/Restore tool criu.org
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Dan Feigin 5141fbcca8 pie: restore VMA pages with native AIO
Private anonymous VMA contents have to be copied inside the PIE
restorer after mappings are placed at their final addresses.
Replace the synchronous preadv loop with a bounded Linux native AIO
window that submits page-read iovecs, reaps completions, and
resubmits short reads.

Keep auto-dedup punching on completed byte ranges and tear down the
AIO context on both success and error paths. The pages fd is
prepared for O_DIRECT before entering the restorer.

VMA page reads are page-aligned by construction: the destination
buffers are page-aligned, the iovec lengths are page multiples, and
the file offsets are page-aligned. O_DIRECT completions are
therefore always a whole number of pages (short reads only occur at
MAX_RW_COUNT or at EOF on page-multiple files), so resubmitting a
short read keeps its offset and buffers aligned without masking the
completion length.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-sonnet-4-6
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Signed-off-by: Dan Feigin <dfeigin@nvidia.com>
2026-06-01 14:25:13 -07:00
.circleci ci: silence CircleCI warning about deprecated image 2024-09-11 16:02:11 -07:00
.github ci: shard alpine-test into parallel jobs to reduce CI time 2026-05-24 07:19:51 +01:00
compel compel: add io_destroy syscall 2026-06-01 14:25:13 -07:00
contrib contrib: add tests for criu-service-client 2026-04-22 12:58:59 +01:00
coredump mem: don't PROT_WRITE on reservation mmaps 2026-05-07 11:45:34 -07:00
crit contributing: update links to mailing list 2025-11-02 07:48:24 -08:00
criu pie: restore VMA pages with native AIO 2026-06-01 14:25:13 -07:00
Documentation readme: use a local copy of the CRIU logo 2025-12-17 08:43:50 -08:00
images pipes: restore pipe ownership to fix /proc/self/fd access 2026-03-25 21:09:15 -07:00
include compel: fix heap alignment for structs with xsave state 2026-03-25 04:31:18 +01:00
lib mem: don't PROT_WRITE on reservation mmaps 2026-05-07 11:45:34 -07:00
plugins plugins/amdgpu: Fix unbalanced quotes in a warning message 2026-05-22 10:59:51 -07:00
scripts ci: shard alpine-test into parallel jobs to reduce CI time 2026-05-24 07:19:51 +01:00
soccr soccr: Log name of socket queue that failed to restore. 2023-10-22 13:29:25 -07:00
test zdtm: unregister rseq before zeroing the rseq area 2026-05-22 11:00:24 -07:00
.cirrus.yml ci: remove aarch64 Fedora Rawhide from Cirrus CI 2026-03-29 20:26:45 -07:00
.clang-format clang-format: disable column limit constraint 2023-10-22 13:29:25 -07:00
.codespellrc codespell: skip amdgpu kernel headers 2025-11-14 18:31:37 +00:00
.gitignore Keep images/google/protobuf directory 2025-11-02 07:48:22 -08:00
.lgtm.yml images: remove symlink for descriptor.proto 2025-11-02 07:48:22 -08:00
.mailmap mailmap: update my email 2023-04-15 21:17:21 -07:00
CLAUDE.md docs: add developer overviews for AI assistants 2025-11-02 07:48:23 -08:00
CONTRIBUTING.md contributing: document AI-assisted contribution guidelines 2026-03-19 16:44:10 +00:00
COPYING COPYING: fix a typo in a preamble 2016-08-11 16:18:43 +03:00
CREDITS Add the CREDITS file 2012-07-30 13:52:37 +04:00
flake.lock feat: specify ourselves as Nix flake source 2026-03-15 21:04:43 +00:00
flake.nix feat: remove build-time patches from Nixpkgs 2026-03-15 21:04:43 +00:00
GEMINI.md contributing: document AI-assisted contribution guidelines 2026-03-19 16:44:10 +00:00
INSTALL.md docs: mark make commands with same format as elsewhere 2025-03-21 12:40:31 -07:00
MAINTAINERS MAINTAINERS: Update maintainer roles 2026-02-22 15:23:04 -08:00
MAINTAINERS_GUIDE.md Fix some codespell warnings 2022-04-28 17:53:52 -07:00
Makefile contrib: add tests for criu-service-client 2026-04-22 12:58:59 +01:00
Makefile.compel Remove travis-ci leftovers 2025-11-02 07:48:23 -08:00
Makefile.config make: remove checks and warnings for bsd strlcat and strlcpy 2025-11-02 07:48:21 -08:00
Makefile.install make: don't install external dependencies 2025-11-05 15:41:34 -08:00
Makefile.versions criu: Version 4.2 (CRIUTIBILITY) 2025-11-13 08:40:46 -08:00
README.md readme: update reference to consolidated workflows 2026-03-09 10:29:57 +00:00

CI CircleCI

CRIU -- A project to implement checkpoint/restore functionality for Linux

CRIU (stands for Checkpoint and Restore in Userspace) is a utility to checkpoint/restore Linux tasks.

Using this tool, you can freeze a running application (or part of it) and checkpoint it to a hard drive as a collection of files. You can then use the files to restore and run the application from the point it was frozen at. The distinctive feature of the CRIU project is that it is mainly implemented in user space. There are some more projects doing C/R for Linux, and so far CRIU appears to be the most feature-rich and up-to-date with the kernel.

CRIU project is (almost) the never-ending story, because we have to always keep up with the Linux kernel supporting checkpoint and restore for all the features it provides. Thus we're looking for contributors of all kinds -- feedback, bug reports, testing, coding, writing, etc. Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md if you would like to get involved.

The project started as the way to do live migration for OpenVZ Linux containers, but later grew to more sophisticated and flexible tool. It is currently used by (integrated into) OpenVZ, LXC/LXD, Docker, and other software, project gets tremendous help from the community, and its packages are included into many Linux distributions.

The project home is at http://criu.org. This wiki contains all the knowledge base for CRIU we have. Pages worth starting with are:

Checkpoint and restore of simple loop process

Advanced features

As main usage for CRIU is live migration, there's a library for it called P.Haul. Also the project exposes two cool core features as standalone libraries. These are libcompel for parasite code injection and libsoccr for TCP connections checkpoint-restore.

Live migration

True live migration using CRIU is possible, but doing all the steps by hands might be complicated. The phaul sub-project provides a Go library that encapsulates most of the complexity. This library and the Go bindings for CRIU are stored in the go-criu repository.

Parasite code injection

In order to get state of the running process CRIU needs to make this process execute some code, that would fetch the required information. To make this happen without killing the application itself, CRIU uses the parasite code injection technique, which is also available as a standalone library called libcompel.

TCP sockets checkpoint-restore

One of the CRIU features is the ability to save and restore state of a TCP socket without breaking the connection. This functionality is considered to be useful by itself, and we have it available as the libsoccr library.

Licence

The project is licensed under GPLv2 (though files sitting in the lib/ directory are LGPLv2.1).

All files in the images/ directory are licensed under the Expat license (so-called MIT). See the images/LICENSE file.