Pete's Log: checkpointing, completion, shadelessness
Entry #799, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 22 years old.)
so I've done my share of reading about checkpointing of late. It's neat stuff. There's some interesting OS issues involved. The basic idea is easy enough: save the state of a process into a file so it can be restarted later. One cool thing I thought was that several userlevel checkpointing systems use setjmp/longjmp to save the stack and such. Which is a cool use of setjmp. I knew it was a cool thing, but never considered using it across process lifetimes. So I think sometime soon I wanna write up a little program that stores itself to a file. If invoked with some command line option, it'll restore itself from said file. Just to begin playing with this stuff. Then add fun things like open files. Of course, there's a lot of open source checkpointing code out there that I will likely want to play with at some point, but first I wanna play with it a little on my own. The next fun thing is kernel-supported checkpointing. This seems rather easy to me, cuz the kernel (at least in linux and other such os's) already does a good deal of what checkpointing does: when processes are swapped to disk.
So I finally got around to doing something I've been meaning to do for a while: I played around with the tcsh complete builtin and created a .complete file that gets sourced by my .cshrc. I foresee that this file will grow a lot as I discover more completions I want done for me. tcsh rocks.
comp arch homework: 4 book problems and one programming problem that is simple stuff like instruction counting. but we're supposed to run this both on solaris and on linux. Solaris I can use shade. linux I can't. This saddens me. But I've been asked to give a brief 5 minute presentation in class next tuesday on how I went about doing the programming problem. So I wanna do an extraspecialgood job. Cuz the motto for cse 521? "Dr Uhran, this is personal." ... I have an interesting way of exacting revenge.