Re: lost data?

["George N. White III" <WhiteG(at)dfo-mpo.gc.ca>]

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Jaco van Gorkom wrote:

>
> George N. White III wrote in message ...
> ...
> >Some OS's (SGI Irix) have a checkpoint facility that works at the level of
> >processes, and doesn't require support built in to the application.  I
> >know there has been some work on checkpointing for linux, as the same
> >capability is required to migrate a process to a new node in some
> >distributed processing systems. I don't know if there is anything you can
> >use with IDL, but it is certainly worth a look.
> ...
>
> One question here, just for my understanding:
> what kind of thing is checkpointing?
>
>   Jaco

Checkpointing saves an "image" of a running program in such a way
that you can restart the program at that point in the event of a
crash.  For Linux, see:

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~edpin/epckpt/

You can write applications that save their state, but if you have
OS-level support you can checkpoint applications.  Checkpointing
does impose some constraints on the application, and you may need
lots of disk space to hold the checkpoint files.

-- 
George N. White III <gnw3@acm.org> Bedford Institute of Oceanography