freezing a process 2689

Black Sun and said:

OTOH, check out the "process checkpointing" that J.P. mentioned in the other branch. It *might* work properly for what you want to do.

The problem lies in the exact mapping of virtual memory to physical memory. The kernel'd have to save those maps and restore them. IANAKernelDev, but there may not be a currently-existing way to do that across reboots (modulo that checkpointing thing).

? On a semi-modern machine, compiling kdebase only takes 2 hours, and kdebase is *big*. mp3s encode faster than realtime on a PIII-900. ITYMeant "ripping and encoding DVDs", right?

...I suppose, but this seems like re-inventing the wheel and making it pentagonal. There's already a decent solution for long, time-consuming things that run in the background--"man nice". This never comes up for me; my desktop's on 24-7 and my laptop does suspend-to-RAM just fine. Computer equipment, especially hard disks, is kind of like the diesel engines on large trucks--the most wear occurs at spinup. Fewer spinup cycles = longer component life, and with modern CPU frequency scalers, an idle machine can run at ~1000MHz instead of ~2200MHz, sucking roughly half the power. I've heard that some desktops can do suspend-to-RAM, which might be a decent solution for you as well, and would require *much* less work on your part. sys-power-state on my desktop says it can--I'll have to try that out later and see if it actually works without something puking.

So, a slopsucker that's configurable with a file? I thought something like that already existed, but ICBW. Part of the problem is determining whether user-interactive stuff is running or not. System load isn't always totally correct here--some things have relatively low effects on sysload but will lag if another process is fighting for CPU time. Checking whether X events are happening on :0 could be part of the answer, but that'd mean linking with Xlib at the very least.

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