Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate [LWN.net]

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 10:57 UTC (Tue) by jpnp (guest, #63341)
In reply to: Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate by mjthayer
Parent article: Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

> The downside is that it needs fast boot times to be most useful.

But even then, you end up with a load of cold caches. It might be fine for the "I'm shutting down this laptop until I need it tomorrow" use case (even here note that Fedora users for whom hibernation works, but who were used to resuming a sleeping system in the morning were disappointed with the speed of unhibernating instead), but it's not necessarily so good for the "shut the laptop while I walk from my desk to the meeting room" use case.

Android is in a fundamentally different position, with its API having been designed for that model from the beginning. That said, I'd love to see more work on save/restore in linux DEs.

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Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 19:08 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

Could we agree that save and restore as a back-up for when the battery runs out during sleep would be a good thing?

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 19, 2018 12:03 UTC (Wed) by jpnp (guest, #63341) [Link]

Absolutely. Save and restore is a good thing all round. Posix systems can't do what Android Apps do by default, but there's no reason why they can't individually support session restore, and indicate to the DE that they do. If enough do then it would be feasible for the OS/DE to respond to system memory pressure by closing such opted-in applications which are not showing. I would love to see progress here. Even teach bash to restore itself and the processes its running (a hard task in general no doubt). It's all a great insurance against system crashes of various sorts; I can't imagine using a text editor which doesn't keep recovery information.

I just don't think it's a replacement for system suspend. When I hit the power button and put my Android phone in my pocket, it's not actually closing apps never mind powering down the system, it's just putting them in a lower power state until I switch the screen back on.