Skip to content
  • John Baldwin's avatar
    Initial support for bhyve save and restore. · 483d953a
    John Baldwin authored
    Save and restore (also known as suspend and resume) permits a snapshot
    to be taken of a guest's state that can later be resumed.  In the
    current implementation, bhyve(8) creates a UNIX domain socket that is
    used by bhyvectl(8) to send a request to save a snapshot (and
    optionally exit after the snapshot has been taken).  A snapshot
    currently consists of two files: the first holds a copy of guest RAM,
    and the second file holds other guest state such as vCPU register
    values and device model state.
    
    To resume a guest, bhyve(8) must be started with a matching pair of
    command line arguments to instantiate the same set of device models as
    well as a pointer to the saved snapshot.
    
    While the current implementation is useful for several uses cases, it
    has a few limitations.  The file format for saving the guest state is
    tied to the ABI of internal bhyve structures and is not
    self-describing (in that it does not communicate the set of device
    models present in the system).  In addition, the state saved for some
    device models closely matches the internal data structures which might
    prove a challenge for compatibility of snapshot files across a range
    of bhyve versions.  The file format also does not currently support
    versioning of individual chunks of state.  As a result, the current
    file format is not a fixed binary format and future revisions to save
    and restore will break binary compatiblity of snapshot files.  The
    goal is to move to a more flexible format that adds versioning,
    etc. and at that point to commit to providing a reasonable level of
    compatibility.  As a result, the current implementation is not enabled
    by default.  It can be enabled via the WITH_BHYVE_SNAPSHOT=yes option
    for userland builds, and the kernel option BHYVE_SHAPSHOT.
    
    Submitted by:	Mihai Tiganus, Flavius Anton, Darius Mihai
    Submitted by:	Elena Mihailescu, Mihai Carabas, Sergiu Weisz
    Relnotes:	yes
    Sponsored by:	University Politehnica of Bucharest
    Sponsored by:	Matthew Grooms (student scholarships)
    Sponsored by:	iXsystems
    Differential Revision:	https://reviews.freebsd.org/D19495
    483d953a