How can I avoid auto start of deployed bundles?

We have various ways to do this especially for test cases. Generally however, it is one of the critical issues that we have not yet settled on how to go forward with.

Please monitor https://issues.jboss.org/browse/AS7-3694

Meanwhile, you can use the @DeploymentMarker like this

@DeploymentMarker(autoStart = false)
public class DeploymentMarkerActivatorB implements BundleActivator {

    @Override
    public void start(BundleContext context) throws Exception {
    }

    @Override
    public void stop(BundleContext context) throws Exception {
    }
}

Is there a possibility to persist bundle state over restart of JBoss OSGi in AS7?

This should work. What version of AS7 are we talking about?

The answers that I give here are in the context of 7.2.0.Alpha1, which is not yet released.

Please build from https://github.com/jbossas/jboss-as

Folks like you could provide valuable feedback before the release.

Checkout the feature list that is already available in the 7.1.2.Alpha1 codebase.