runtime-rs: Support Pod-level checkpoint and restore with sandbox service

Author: ApokleosCreated Aug 17, 2026Updated Sep 14, 2026
Labelsfeatureneeds-review

KEP References

First of all, Thanks the KEP owners bring us such amazing feature!

Problem

KEP-5823 adds CheckpointPod and RestorePod to CRI. containerd needs to coordinate these Pod-level operations with sandbox runtimes.

Independent container checkpoints cannot capture a consistent VM or shared sandbox. The sandbox runtime must own the Pod-wide execution-state boundary, while containerd must continue to own CRI validation, lifecycle locking, CNI, NRI, new IDs, task adoption, publication, rollback, and restart recovery.

Alternatives and extensibility

We considered these alternatives:

  • independent container checkpoints do not provide a consistent VM or sandbox checkpoint;
  • interpreting checkpoint formats in containerd would couple CRI to individual runtimes;
  • delegating the whole operation to the runtime would bypass containerd-owned CNI, NRI, metadata, task, and rollback semantics;
  • skipping NRI would make restored workloads differ from normally created workloads;
  • always creating a new snapshot can replace checkpoint-authoritative writable state for a runtime-owned-rootfs implementation.

Source: kata-containers/kata-containers