Anybody done this

[Dave Love]

Joe Armstrong <joe@REDACTED> writes:

>   To  answer my  own question  - since  what I  really want  to  do is
> suspend Elang and  resume it on another machine

That's what unexec allows (assuming another machine of the same
OS/architecture, of course, and subject to what can actually persist).

> I could do this is a number of ways.
>
>   1) Hack Erlang to do this (difficult)

_Using_ unexec, say, isn't necessarily terribly difficult if you have
it working on your system, though there are gotchas.

>      Really I'd like a virtual OS which could be suspended and
>      resumed -

Is it clear this makes sense generally?

Probably Squeak Smalltalk is the most portable system that supports
dumping your world.  Presumably it has lessons in what you can do, at
least.

> Oh and I'd like to "virtualise" all resources (hence my question on ext2).

Inferno virtualizes resources, including the machine, but I'm not
aware that you can dump the VM.  (I assume there's no reason you
couldn't use its protocol from Erlang, say with existing Inferno or
Plan 9 servers.)  Has it been considered as an example of `conceptual
integrity'?  <URL:http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/design.html>

[I'm sure the Grid could do all this with enough XML metadata for the
Java application in your e-science environment.  But perhaps you need
to be in UK academia to understand...]