[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > I recently read a discusiion about a freeze/thaw plugin.
> > someone stated that the biggest challenge would be to
> > save/restore note the cpu state, but all external plugins�
> > state(maybe im wrong on this. it was something with "all external
> > I/O devices", but those are all in the bochs-plugin, right?).
> > IIRC the plugin API has no save/restore interface.
> That would be me.
>
> The comment that saving IO devices is the hard part was more or less
> a guess; I'm not really qualified for more. But from what I can
> tell, getting the CPU state is pretty easy -- all the hard parts
> (noteably the hidden parts of the descriptors) we have virtualized.
> Everything we don't have virtualized we can steal from the task-switch
> code of the kernel (any kernel), pretty much.
>
> I rather like your idea of adding save/restore APIs for plugins; that
> would indeed make it easy.
>
> How's this API:
> void *plugin_saveyourself(size_t *len);
> int plugin_init (plugin_t *plugin, int argc, char *argv[], void *data, size_t len);
>
> Where SaveYourself should return a pointer to arbitrary data to be
> stored, and sets len to the length of that data. It is the plugin's
> responsiblity to allocate memory, which will be leaked (we're about
> to exit when this is called anyway, and this avoids the "which free()"
> question).
>
> The last two parameters on the plugin_init will be zero if not
> restoring from a freeze. The plugin should check both that len
> is not zero and that the pointer isn't NULL, however.
>
> How does this sound? It would require freeze/thaw in core user, but
> that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
>
> I think we should make it simply undefined to restore plugin state
> when the options for that plugin have changed. That should keep the
> restore code from being too hairy. I think most things would only
> have to save their global vars and literaly restore them.
>
> -=- James Mastros
Of course, the processor and plug-ins would have to be in a stopped
state when this happens. I assume there's a way to do this now, but I
don't know.
--
-Dave Turner
___________________________________________________________
<novalis> Myself, Laurel, Pug, and Pug's other personality.
<pug> I only get two?
