Resuming from a crashdump

[Peter Jeremy]

On Mon, 2005-Jan-24 20:22:27 +0100, Christian Laursen wrote:
>The idea would be to force the system to "crash" and make a
>dump on a dedicated partition. On boot after initializing devices
>but before mounting /, the kernel would check that partition and
>if it found a dump there restore it to the machine's memory,
>reinitialize devices and continue where it left off.

At a process level, this is what emacs and TeX used to do many years
ago (have a look for "undump").

What you are describing is basically the same as the suspend-to-disk
that some laptops support.  Implementing it is non-trivial because
each I/O device needs to be re-initialised into the state it was before
the suspend.  You also have to work out how to handle the intervening
(lost) time - what happens to at/cron jobs and timers that should have
fired in the intervening period?

Note that in many circumstances, you will lose all external TCP
connections when keep-alive timers expire in remote systems and
firewalls.

-- 
Peter Jeremy