My Interest In Optimize COW Memory Project (GSoC 2026)

Hi Andrei 👋,

My name is Fiyinfoluwa and I am interested in applying for the "Optimize 
COW Memory Dumping" GSoC 2026 project with CRIU.

I have already set up the development environment on Ubuntu 24.04, built 
CRIU v4.2 from source on the criu-dev branch, and successfully performed 
checkpoint/restore of a basic process.

As the ideas page recommended, I have started studying the two 
referenced code locations in criu/mem.c — the COW VMA preparation at 
line 878 and the private VMA content restore at line 1219 — to 
understand how CRIU currently handles COW memory during dump and restore.

I have a background in C and Linux systems programming which I believe 
is relevant to this project given the memory management internals involved.

Before I start drafting my proposal I have a few questions:

1. Is this project still available for GSoC 2026?
2. When you say the project aims to avoid dumping duplicate COW pages, 
is the approach to detect shared pages at dump time using something like 
/proc/kpageflags, or is there a different mechanism you have in mind?
3. Are there existing discussions or prior attempts I should study 
before proposing an approach?
4. Would you be open to reviewing a draft proposal before the March 31st 
deadline?

Thank you for your time.

Fiyinfoluwa
GitHub: https://github.com/fiyinfoluwa001