Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Aah, so that's what happens. So what I need is a script that does: if suspend fails and laptop lid is closed, start playing an alarm at maximum volume. And cuts power if no response within a few minutes.

Much better than hearing a loud whirring noise a few hours later and then pulling an overcooked laptop out of your bag.

> There's no "hours of uncommitted data" either. There's one filesystem commit interval at most.

Well, not everything is saved on disk. If you have a document open that isn't saved then sync won't help anyway. It'd be great if there was a way to announce to running programs that the system is being suspended and to dump state, but that doesn't exist or isn't widely supported. Currently suspend (for me) is primarily a way to avoid the startup time. It's not reliable enough to rely on.

Mind you, I just found a basic-pm-debugging.txt in the kernel documentation which describs steps that can be used to debug issues. My current problem is that ext4 is trying to read a directory inode on resume while the the disk is not ready, and it remounts the rootfs readonly. The machine is then essentially unrecoverable (neither su nor sudo work with a readonly fs).