Installation
criu is an utility to checkpoint/restore a process tree. This page describes how to manually build and install prerequisites and the tool itself.
Installing from packages
Some distributions provide ready-to-use packages. If no, or the CRIU version you want is not yet there, you will need to get CRIU sources and compile it.
Obtaining CRIU Source
You can download the source code as a release tarball or sync the git repository. If you plan to modify CRIU sources (e.g. to contribute the code back) the latter way is highly recommended. The latest and greatest sources are:
| Tarball: | criu-4.0.tar.gz |
| Version: | 4.0 "CRIUDA" |
| Released: | 20 Sep 2024 |
| GIT tag: | v4.0 |
Build dependencies
Compiler and C Library
CRIU is mostly written in C and the build system is based on Makefiles. Thus just install standard gcc and make packages (on Debian use build-essential).
For building with 32bit tasks C/R support you will need libc6-dev-i386, gcc-multilib instead of gcc.
Cross-compilation for ARM is also possible.
Protocol Buffers
CRIU uses the Google Protocol Buffers to read and write images and thus requires C language bindings. The protoc tool is required at build time and the libprotobuf-c.so shared object is required at build and run time. CRIT also uses python language bindings for protocol buffers and requires the descriptor.proto file typically provided by a distribution's protobuf development package.
- RPM packages
protobuf protobuf-c protobuf-c-devel protobuf-compiler protobuf-devel protobuf-python
- Debian packages
libprotobuf-dev libprotobuf-c0-dev protobuf-c-compiler protobuf-compiler python-protobuf
- Ubuntu packages
libprotobuf-dev libprotobuf-c0-dev protobuf-c-compiler protobuf-compiler python-protobuf
Optionally, you may build protobuf from sources.
Other deps
pkg-configto check on build library dependencies.python-ipaddris used by CRIT to pretty-print ip.libbsd. If available, CRIU will be compiled withsetproctitle()support. It will allow to make process titles of service workers to be more verbose.iproute2version 3.5.0 or higher is needed for dumping network namespaces. The latest one can be cloned from iproute2. It should be compiled and a path to ip written in the environment variableCR_IP_TOOL.libcap-devel(RPM) /libcap-dev(DEB)libnet-devel libnl3-devel(RPM) /libnet1-dev(DEB) /libnl-3-dev libnet-dev(Ubuntu)
For APT use "--no-install-recommends" parameter is to avoid asciidoc pulling in a lot of dependencies. Also read about ZDTM test suite if you want to run CRIU tests.
Linux Kernel
Linux kernel v3.11 or newer is required, with some specific options set. Various CRIU features might require even newer kernel. If your distribution does not provide needed kernel, you might want to compile one yourself. Criu can check the kernel features presence.
Building CRIU From Source
Simply run make in the CRIU source directory. This is the standard way, but there are some options available.
- There's a docker-build target in Makefile which builds CRIU in Ubuntu Docker container. Just run
make docker-buildand that's it. - CRIU has functionality that is either optional or behaves differently depending on the kernel CRIU is running on. By default build process includes maximum of it, but this behavior can be changed.
- You may specify build dependencies by hands
Installation
CRIU works perfectly even when run from the sources directory (with the ./criu/criu command), but if you want to have in standard paths run make install. You may need to install asciidoc and xmlto packages to make install-man work.
Checking That It Works
First thing to do is to run criu check. At the end it should say "Looks OK", if it doesn't the messages on the screen explain what functionality is missing.
Some kernel functionality is required in rare cases and may not block the dump (but sometimes may). These features can be checked by adding the --extra flag.
If you're using our custom kernel, then the --all option can be used, in this case CRIU would check for all the kernel features to work.
You can then try running the ZDTM Test Suite which sits in the tests/zdtm/ directory.