Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate [LWN.net]

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 17, 2018 22:47 UTC (Mon) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
In reply to: Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate by smurf
Parent article: Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

how systemd is supposed to discover whether hibernation works reliably

systemd includes a hardware quirks database (hwdb) and a kernel/userspace device matching system (udev), so it's perfectly positioned to know if some hardware supports hibernation reliably or not.

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Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 17, 2018 23:34 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

Based on the combination of hardware, firmware version and kernel version?

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 10:25 UTC (Tue) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (2 responses)

I mean: if the kernel wants to detect that, since it has access to all those three items, then it's also fine by me.

It's unlikely that GNOME, or any other high level user space UI, would be able to access those three things without building a huge quirks database anyway, so might as well defer to components that already have that database.

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 16:12 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

No component has the necessary information to determine that hibernation will work reliably.

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 20:27 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

Great if there's some component on the system that can provide a best-guess as to whether it would work or not.

But, how about deferring to ME for the final decision, rather than some probably-out-of-date and not-quite-complete static database, regardless of where it lives?

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 17:29 UTC (Tue) by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876) [Link] (1 responses)

We had such a quirks database with hal. I don't want to go back there.

Imho this is rather simple: GNOME should default to suspend-to-ram and only offer suspend-then-hibernate as an option.

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 21, 2018 2:55 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

udev having a quirks database isn't “going back to HAL” — it's keeping us out of the 2.4 dark ages where everyone had to hand-roll their modprobe script, xfree86.conf and asound.conf if they wanted hardware from $overpriced-PC-brand to work sanely.

Take an actual look in /lib/udev/hwdb.d/ (or /usr/share/{libinput,alsa,X11}/) sometime and marvel at how many $1000+ laptops have broken input and output devices that you haven't had to know about in 10 years or more, because someone else has gone through the pain for you (and BSD users!)

And this is just the userspace side of it; the kernel has its *own* quirks lists for really bad hardware like those self-bricking Intel NICs.