CRIU (stands for Checkpoint and Restore in Userspace) is a utility to checkpoint/restore Linux tasks.

Using this tool, you can freeze a running application (or part of it) and checkpoint it to a hard drive as a collection of files. You can then use the files to restore and run the application from the point it was frozen at. The distinctive feature of the CRIU project is that it is mainly implemented in user space. There are some more projects doing C/R for Linux, and so far CRIU appears to be the most feature-rich and up-to-date with the kernel.

CRIU project is (almost) the never-ending story, because we have to always keep up with the Linux kernel supporting checkpoint and restore for all the features it provides. Thus we're looking for contributors of all kinds -- feedback, bug reports, testing, coding, writing, etc. Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md if you would like to get involved.

The project started as the way to do live migration for OpenVZ Linux containers, but later grew to more sophisticated and flexible tool. It is currently used by (integrated into) OpenVZ, LXC/LXD, Docker, and other software, project gets tremendous help from the community, and its packages are included into many Linux distributions.