How to "hibernate" a process in Linux by storing its memory to disk and restoring it later?

I used to maintain CryoPID, which is a program that does exactly what you are talking about. It writes the contents of a program's address space, VDSO, file descriptor references and states to a file that can later be reconstructed. CryoPID started when there were no usable hooks in Linux itself and worked entirely from userspace (actually, it still does work, depending on your distro / kernel / security settings).

Problems were (indeed) sockets, pending RT signals, numerous X11 issues, the glibc caching getpid() implementation amongst many others. Randomization (especially VDSO) turned out to be insurmountable for the few of us working on it after Bernard walked away from it. However, it was fun and became the topic of several masters thesis.

If you are just contemplating a program that can save its running state and re-start directly into that state, its far .. far .. easier to just save that information from within the program itself, perhaps when servicing a signal.

I'd like to put a status update here, as of 2014.

The accepted answer suggests CryoPID as a tool to perform Checkpoint/Restore, but I found the project to be unmantained and impossible to compile with recent kernels. Now, I found two actively mantained projects providing the application checkpointing feature.

The first, the one I suggest 'cause I have better luck running it, is CRIU that performs checkpoint/restore mainly in userspace, and requires the kernel option CONFIG_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE enabled to work.

Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace, or CRIU (pronounced kree-oo, IPA: /krɪʊ/, Russian: криу), is a software tool for Linux operating system. Using this tool, you can freeze a running application (or part of it) and checkpoint it to a hard drive as a collection of files. You can then use the files to restore and run the application from the point it was frozen at. The distinctive feature of the CRIU project is that it is mainly implemented in user space.

The latter is DMTCP; quoting from their main page:

DMTCP (Distributed MultiThreaded Checkpointing) is a tool to transparently checkpoint the state of multiple simultaneous applications, including multi-threaded and distributed applications. It operates directly on the user binary executable, without any Linux kernel modules or other kernel modifications.

There is also a nice Wikipedia page on the argument: Application_checkpointing

The answers mentioning ctrl-z are really talking about stopping the process with a signal, in this case SIGTSTP. You can issue a stop signal with kill:

kill -STOP <pid>

That will suspend execution of the process. It won't immediately free the memory used by it, but as memory is required for other processes the memory used by the stopped process will be gradually swapped out.

When you want to wake it up again, use

kill -CONT <pid>

The more complicated solutions, like CryoPID, are really only needed if you want the stopped process to be able to survive a system shutdown/restart - it doesn't sound like you need that.