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Re: Please consider hibernate for sarge



On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 07:02:43PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:

> > It also reduces the possibility of serious data corruption when suspending
> > your machine and then booting with a non-resume-capable kernel.
> 
> Reduces, but doesn't eliminate?  How likely is it that such corruption will
> happen?

The new version of hibernate looks for swap devices with a software
suspend header and invalidates the suspend image by mkswap'ing over
it.  It finds swap partitions and files okay in non-pathological cases
(I believe exceptions include swap on LVM or encrypted using dm-crypt,
both of which require substantial effort to use as suspend targets
anyway; or if the partition isn't listed in /etc/fstab).

The potential for data corruption comes in when you suspend (writing
out an image containing all kernel data structures, including disc
caches and filesystem meta data and so on), then boot a kernel not
configured for resuming which mounts your filesystems read-write and
starts writing to them (or even just replaying the journal), and then
reboot again, resuming the saved image.  Now the state of the
filesystem on disc doesn't match the original kernel's idea of what
should be there, and things go awry.

While this is warned against in the suspend2 documentation, it still
seems that people manage to do this every now and again - especially
when setting up suspend for the first time and not setting the resume
device correctly on the kernel command line or initrd.

> Based on the available information, I'm not willing to accept a
> newly-uploaded new upstream version into sarge.

No problem.  I certainly don't see the version in Sarge as being
useless or unusable in any way.

Cheers,

Cameron.


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