Libckpt: transparent checkpointing under Unix
James S. Plank, Micah D. Beck, Gerry Kingsley, Kai Li · 1995
Checkpointing is a simple technique for rollback recovery: the state of an executing program is periodically saved to a disk file from whichitcan 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 that implements all applicable performance optimizations which are reported in the literature. While libckpt can be used in a mode whichis 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.