System image
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In
non-volatile form such as a file. A system is said to be capable of using system images if it can be shut down and later restored to exactly the same state. In such cases, system images can be used for backup
.
Hibernation is an example that uses an image of the entire machine's RAM
.
Disk images
If a system has all its state written to a disk, then a system image can be produced by simply copying that disk to a file elsewhere, often with disk cloning applications. On many systems a complete system image cannot be created by a disk cloning program running within that system because information can be held outside of disks and volatile memory, for example in non-volatile memory like boot ROMs.
Process images
A
hibernate feature of many operating systems. Here, the state of all RAM
memory is stored to disk, the computer is brought into an energy saving mode, then later restored to normal operation.
Some
savestate
.
Another use is code mobility: a mobile agent can migrate between machines by having its state saved, then copying the data to another machine and restarting there.
Programming language support
Some
read-eval-print loop, which usually compiles the programs. Data is loaded into the running Lisp system. The programmer may then dump
a system image, containing that pre-compiled and possibly customized code—and also all loaded application data.
Often this image is an executable, and can be run on other machines. This system image can be the form in which executable programs are distributed—this method has often been used by programs (such as idiosyncratic
languages to avoid spending time repeating the same initialization work every time they start up.
Similar,
Lisp Machines
were booted from Lisp images, called Worlds. The World contains the complete operating system, its applications and its data in a single file. It was also possible to save incremental Worlds, that contain only the changes from some base World. Before saving the World, the Lisp Machine operating system could optimize the contents of memory (better memory layout, compacting data structures, sorting data, ...).
Although its purpose is different, a "system image" is often similar in structure to a core dump.
See also
- Disk image
- ISO image