Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

While it is true that distributions did not care much about hibernation in general until relatively recently, I can't agree with the statement that it has been neglected for the last few years. In fact, it is actively maintained and under active development too, at least at the kernel level.

For example, in 2016 LWN.net ran an article regarding it (https://lwn.net/Articles/701639/) and two hibernation-specific patch sets have been posted recently (https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-pm/list/?serie... and https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-pm/list/?serie... - the most recent version of the former is in linux-next now). ARM64 support for hibernation was added in 2016 too.

Apart from that, many changes related to system-wide suspend also affect hibernation, since they both share the core code for handling devices. Moreover, the helper macros for setting PM callbacks used by device drivers are designed to cover hibernation too, so driver changes made to support system-wide suspend often cover hibernation automatically and no more hibernation-specific work is needed in the given driver.

Admittedly, image encryption is only supported via the user-space tools (suspend-utils) which is somewhat cumbersome to set up, but it's been there for the last 7 years at least. While hibernation as implemented in the mainline kernel doesn't work with UEFI secure boot at this time, SUSE has been carrying an out-of-the-tree set of patches to implement that for a couple of years (as far as I can say) and work on adding that support to the mainline is in progress.

Given a typical swap configuration, hibernation should work on all systems where system-wide suspend works and it may work on some systems where system-wide suspend doesn't work too (one of them is under my desk right now, actually). I use it on a daily basis with no problems at all.

Generally, hibernation is regarded as a supported feature of the Linux kernel. Problems with it should be reported (either to linux-pm@vger.kernel.org or through the kernel Bugzilla) and they will be taken care of, subject to prioritization.