EECS Publication
Libckpt: Transparent Checkpointing under Unix
James S. Plank, Micah Beck, Gerry Kingsley, and Kai Li
Checkpointing is a simple technique for rollback recovery: the state of an executing program is periodically saved to a disk file from which it can be recovered after a failure. While recent research has developed a collection of powerful techniques for minimizing the overhead of writing checkpoint files, checkpointing remains unavailable to most application developers. In this paper we describe libckpt, a portable checkpointing tool for Unix 1 that implements all applicable performance optimizations which are reported in the literature. hile libckpt can be used in a mode which is almost totally transparent to the programmer, it also supports the incorporation of user directives into the creation of checkpoints. This user-directed checkpointing is an innovation which is unique to our work.
Published 1994-08-01 05:00:00 as ut-cs-94-242 (ID:449)