Welcome to CRIU, a project to implement checkpoint/restore functionality for Linux.
Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace, or CRIU (pronounced kree-oo, IPA: /krɪʊ/, Russian: криу), is a Linux software. It can freeze a running container (or an individual application) and checkpoint its state to disk. The data saved can be used to restore the application and run it exactly as it was during the time of the freeze. Using this functionality, application or container live migration, snapshots, remote debugging, and many other things are now possible.
CRIU started as a project of Virtuozzo, and grew with the tremendous help from the community. It is currently used by (integrated into) OpenVZ, LXC/LXD/Incus, Docker, Podman, Kubernetes and other software, and packaged for many Linux distributions.
DFRWS USA 2026
27-30 July, 2026, Arlington, Virginia, USA
Forensic Analysis of Container Snapshot Chains for Post-Event Reconstruction
EuroMLSys 2026
27 April, 2026, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Towards On-the-Fly Snapshot Memory Compression for Low-Latency Elastic Inference Serving Systems
KubeCon EU 2026
24-26 March, 2026, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V Your Pods: WG Checkpoint Restore in Kubernetes
Optimizing Error Recovery for Cost-Efficient Distributed AI Model Training with Kubernetes
Using
- Getting packages for your distribution
- Or try manual installation to have CRIU on your system
- Usage scenarios
- Ideas how criu can be used (some are crazy indeed)
- Category:HOWTO
- Collection of real world examples of how to use CRIU. Some are complex, some are not. HOW TO dump a simple loop might be the best one to start with. Also a set of asciinema records for real-life examples.
- FAQ & When C/R fails
- A sort of troubleshooting guide
- What can change after C/R
- CRIU cannot (yet) save and restore every single bit of tasks' state. This page describes what bits visible through standard kernel API are such.
- What cannot be checkpointed
- What an application could do to make CRIU refuse to dump it.
- Contacts
- Ways to communicate with CRIU community
Under the hood
External links
- 2026-07-27, Forensic Analysis of Container Snapshot Chains for Post-Event Reconstruction
- 2026-04-27, Towards On-the-Fly Snapshot Memory Compression for Low-Latency Elastic Inference Serving Systems
- 2026-02-24, GPU Checkpoint/Restore Made Fast and Lightweight
- 2026-01-21, Announcing the Checkpoint/Restore Working Group
- 2025-11-17, Engine-Agnostic Model Hot-Swapping for Cost-Effective LLM Inference
- 2025-09-16, Checkpointing and State Transfer for Industrial Controller Redundancy
- 2025-08-13, Software Availability Protection in Cyber-Physical Systems
- 2025-07-14, PhoenixOS: Concurrent OS-level GPU Checkpoint and Restore with Validated Speculation
Misc
- Academic Research
- Podcasts and other audio/video interviews
- Project history
- Logo description
- Events
- CRIU acronym fun