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I'm looking for an operating system (commercial opensorce or any) which can freeze any currently running application (video/audio playback, a game etc.).

While the app is frozen the OS must be able to show some windows (maybe some information to the user) or play some sound etc. In other words the apps are frozen and you can't do anything with them but the OS itself is functional and able to interact with the user.

Ofcourse the consequent unfreezing must be without any loss of app's state if it is possible (the game is not an online multiplayer game where you buddies are long time gone from the place you were at the moment of freezing).

P.S. The questiong is a bit vauge since I don't know the language of OS devs. Maybe this runtime freezing has a special name?

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  • $\begingroup$ Applications have been able to save the current state to a file and to restore it later since the early days of computing. Any document editor does just that. So this is an extremely commonplace process. $\endgroup$
    – user16034
    Commented Feb 24, 2022 at 21:09

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Every pre-emptive multitasking OS has this capability: to freeze a process, once the process finishes its current time slice, simply don't reschedule it again until it is unfrozen.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking and SIGSTOP on Unix.

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  • $\begingroup$ Alright, I guess I've forgotten to mention that the reboot of the system while "in freeze" should not do any thing to the OS. THat after reboot the system should be in the same "freezed" state. Do those mentined by you are capable of it? Thnaks. $\endgroup$
    – coobit
    Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 17:37
  • $\begingroup$ @coobit, that's a different question, and I suggest asking it separately. Handling persistence across reboots is an orthogonal issue. I suggest reading en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_(computer_science) first. $\endgroup$
    – D.W. ♦
    Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 19:11

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