Resuming from a crashdump

[ctodd at chrismiller.com]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Christian Laursen wrote:

> The idea would be to force the system to "crash" and make a
> dump on a dedicated partition. On boot after initializing devices
> but before mounting /, the kernel would check that partition and
> if it found a dump there restore it to the machine's memory,
> reinitialize devices and continue where it left off.

I suggested this very same thing about two months ago. I didn't get any
responses about it being possible, but you would think that it would be.
I'm not sure you would want to "crash" the system, but the pricipals
(writing memory to swap) would be similar. Somehow a "dump" would have to
be interpreted as a clean vs. crash core.

The reason I would like this functionality is for a multi-os system I use
that I could quickly change OSes yet still have my X seesion up with all
my terminal windows open with command history, browser, etc. I suspect
there are other applications as well.

The only suggestion was to use VMware to run other OSes from BSD, but
that's not quite what I was after.

Chris