Ahhh, checkpoint/restart. Used to be popular in the batch world, when
computers crashed much more frequently than they do today.
I'd guess that it would be about as easy to implement in user-level
code as in the kernel, or at least with minimal kernel support to
allow the process to dump the status of the file descriptors more
thoroughly than normally possible.
And as another writer proposed, getting a group of tightly interacting
processes to checkpoint correctly is a decidedly interesting problem.
Why don't you outline such a facility and its various interfaces and
post it publically for a critique? I'm sure that there are people who
could use checkpoint/restart, and implementing it would save them the
trouble of implementing it "manually".
Dale
-- Dale R. Worley Ariadne Internet Services Voice: +1 617-899-7949 Fax: +1 617-899-7946 E-mail: worley@ariadne.com "Internet-based electronic commerce solutions to real business problems."