Hi all,
I am running a server for our research group, and in charge of it, since I'm the main user.
I want to be able to (First) restart the server, while keeping some processes in their running state (runs can take weeks and killing them costs a lot of run time sometimes).
The problem is that I wish also to update the computer (and kernel) occasionally, which means hibernation is not sufficient.
What I'm looking for is a software that "freezes" a process to disk, then revives it after reboot, preferably (of course) in a newer kernel.
I foud the program called cryopid (http://cryopid.berlios.de/ ) that claims to do so but doesn't compile, and is quite old.
Do you know anything like that? I also looked at (and installed) tuxonice, but it doesn't seem to have this feature.
Thanks,
Ranny.

Well, if you're the admin anyway (and the main user), why not just run the updates when no job is running ?

And scheduled downtimes, like e.g last friday of the month 7pm, must be respected by the other users anyway. If that's not the case...

The easiest solution for what you need would be to run the compute jobs inside a virtual machine. These can be frozen and restored as you like. There's virtualbox or a free vmware server available.

Well, I didn't go into details, but what happens is that jobs take a long time to run, sometimes over a week, and since it's a dual-quad, there are a few of them almost all the time. Especially for weekends...
I'm not quite sure about the virtual thingy. The machine is a 64 bit 32 GB mem, and some jobs use a lot of resources. Losing resources for virtualization would be a bad thing to do, and my (personal old laptop) experience with VMware, for instance, was not promising on that part.
Thanks for the advice though.
BTW, some news: I found: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cryopid2 , which is exactly what I'm looking for, only it doesn't work on amd64 (They said it won't and I tried to compile and failed).

Virtualization isn't bad. VMWare is used in our department to run e.g. a license server and other stuff. Very reliable. I had the free version running on my machine some time ago. Compared to VirtualBox it is nice that it comes with a console that connects to the server (local or remote). So you won't have a window pop up for every guest OS that runs. Nice for headless machines. I don't know if it supports assigning multiple cores to a virtual machine though, in case your jobs can be parallelized.

Still by far the easiest way to solve this problem is to have scheduled downtimes, announced a few weeks ahead. Any job running gets killed. End of problem.