Kernel Summit 2006: Software suspend

Posted Jul 18, 2006 19:26 UTC (Tue) by davej (subscriber, #354)
In reply to: Kernel Summit 2006: Software suspend by bojan
Parent article: Kernel Summit 2006: Software suspend

The obvious answer is "Report bugs".

"I can't suspend/resume unless I load module.ko first" is more likely to get things fixed than..

"swsusp sucks, it doesn't work, but suspend2 does".

to post comments

Kernel Summit 2006: Software suspend

Posted Jul 18, 2006 20:09 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (3 responses)

> The obvious answer is "Report bugs".

Which is going to be of great help when that stop is about to come up ;-)

Seriously - of course, you're right. But it's not like driver writers cannot find out which modules have problems. In fact, all of these have been listed in /etc/hibernate/blacklisted-modules for a few years now. And yes, Bernard's hibernate scripts work with both Suspend2 and swsusp, so it's not a Suspend2 only thing.

> "swsusp sucks, it doesn't work, but suspend2 does".

Look, I'll admit that at times I used to say things along those lines when I got annoyed by certain people's arguments. But, I'm not saying that in this thread, because I don't want (any more) flame wars on this topic.

What I'm saying is that Suspend2 can do things that swsusp cannot. Or are you claiming that those two have equivalent functionality? If that is true, why is then uswsusp being built to cover all of the ground that Suspend2 already covers?

Kernel Summit 2006: Software suspend

Posted Jul 18, 2006 20:18 UTC (Tue) by davej (subscriber, #354) [Link] (2 responses)

Frankly, I couldn't care less about the 'features'. Looking at Fedora bugzilla, I have lots of bugs from people wanting it to _JUST WORK_.
I've never seen a single bug report "I want it to look pretty whilst its doing its thing", or "I wish it would write to a swapfile" or "I want to cancel it during a suspend". They're all cute hacks, but lets at least get the functionality there before we start polishing it ?

Kernel Summit 2006: Software suspend

Posted Jul 18, 2006 20:35 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Frankly, I couldn't care less about the 'features'.

Yeah, I noticed many kernel folks share the same view. From my, user perspective, many of those features are very important - especially speed (you kind of want your disk to stop spinning before you slam the laptop in the bag :-). Other users on Suspend2 list report that things like support for swapfiles and regular files is what they find extremely useful in their situations. And then there is responsiveness of the system when it resumes - it's simply essential.

> They're all cute hacks, but lets at least get the functionality there before we start polishing it ?

AFAIK (and this is according to Pavel on LKML), swsusp is not going to be enhanced because it's more or less deprecated in favour of uswsusp. Which is an attempt to build all those Suspend2 features in userspace. Which functionality are you referring to above? Is it the drivers or something more fundamental (e.g. recent patches from Linus to introduce another stage in suspend cycle of the kernel)?

Kernel Summit 2006: Software suspend

Posted Jul 18, 2006 21:57 UTC (Tue) by NCunningham (guest, #6457) [Link]

Hi Dave.

My primary concern is having it 'just work' too. That's why I put the
time in to suspend2.

Obviously I got the order wrong as far as "getting it working well"
and "getting it merged goes". Do you have suggestions for a way forward?

Nigel