Save a process' memory for later use?

Question

Is it possible to pause a process, save the memory contents to a file, and then later reload the file so you can continue the program?

Edit I\'ve be

Answer 1

Raymond Chen explains why it's impossible. Obviously, not all Microsoft engineers read this, because the Visual Studio compiler does this when precompiling headers. Its dumps its own state after compiling the headers for the first time, and restores itself to continue.

Answer 2

Well java has serialization and it comes somewhere near to it. Though you can't do it to the lowest level like CPU registers memory address etc since this will require os to be in same state that was when you 'paused' the process.

This can be a good project as a linux kernel module :-)