bpfCP: Efficient and Extensible Process Checkpointing via eBPF

Live migration, snapshotting, and accelerated startup of applications or containers have long been implemented using checkpoint and restore primitives. To save or 'checkpoint', it is necessary to dump not only its userspace state, but also a large amount of state in the kernel. The current widely used implementation on Linux relies heavily on the /proc file system and special system call interfaces, but these suffer from poor performance and lack extensibility. In this paper, we propose bpfCP, a process checkpointing scheme that dumps in-kernel state via eBPF programs, which improves performance and extensibility. Our preliminary evaluation shows that bpfCP can achieve significant performance improvements in dumping multiple types of in-kernel state of processes.