Cruz: Application-Transparent Distributed Checkpoint-Restart on Standard Operating Systems

We present a new distributed checkpoint-restart mechanism, Cruz, that works without requiring application, library, or base kernel modifications. This mechanism provides comprehensive support for checkpointing and restoring application state, both at user level and within the OS. Our implementation builds on Zap, a process migration mechanism, implemented as a Linux kernel module, which operates by interposing a thin layer between applications and the OS. In particular, we enable support for networked applications by adding migratable IP and MAC addresses, and checkpoint-restart of socket buffer state, socket options, and TCP state. We leverage this capability to devise a novel method for coordinated checkpoint-restart that is simpler than prior approaches. For instance, it eliminates the need to flush communication channels by exploiting the packet re-transmission behavior of TCP and existing OS support for packet filtering. Our experiments show that the overhead of coordinating checkpoint-restart is negligible, demonstrating the scalability of this approach.