The death of Hibernate?

[Joel Rees]

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 9:36 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
>
>
> Am 17.05.2012 14:29, schrieb Joel Rees:
>>> you can guess how long it takes dump 16 GB to disk and load
>>> it
>>
>> Guess, ....
>>
>> Or calculate?
>
> calculate it

I'd like to see your calculations, although I got a clue from your
comment about slow disks.

> it takes way too long

There is a reason for that, other than your harping about how booting
fits your needs better than suspending or hibernating.

> it may acceptable on machines with real fast RAID10
> but they are booting also much faster and are up in 10-15 seconds
> 5 seconds for login and a few seconds for session-restore

Well, on my lenovo S100 ideapaddy or whatever this piece of junk is
called, I have problems getting a good session restore on reboot. It
can wedge xfce4 so that I have to use some workaround to get a shell
and use the --replace option. Bugs. Cheap hardware that I could
actually buy, instead of dream about, to replace the iBook that died
permanently a bit before Christmas.

But, as far as which is faster, I have 1G of RAM. I don't run database
servers or web servers on it. Go ahead, guess or calculate.

I mostly use it on the train for e-mail, text editing, and some
translation work that I'm hoping will stretch the paycheck through the
last week of the month before payday. Sometimes I use it at work to do
things that are not allowed on the computers at work. (Yeah, "tacit"
permission that could bite me, so I only use it for emergencies.) An
Android phone or tablet would be more appropriate, but I could not
afford that, period. Economic realities, here.

Boot time is not what I want to do on the train. Suspend takes maybe
five seconds to sleep, about the same to wake up. Hibernate takes,
actually, not much more, ten seconds max. Cold boot takes somewhere
between thirty seconds and more than a minute.

>> Do you understand the reason you still set up swap, even though your
>> entire workload working set fits into RAM?
>
> there is no single reason if you have neough RAM

In an ideal world, RAM would not consume energy.

This is a real world, what energy I have on the train is a small
Lithium ion battery. Better than a set of NiCd cells, but still quite
limited. And even "just" 1G of RAM consumes quite a bit less suspended
than running, and even less hibernated. Enough that I can suspend,
shut the lid, get off the train, work all morning, and my work state
doesn't disappear in a power-down before lunch. Leaving it running, it
might force power-down by the time I walk twenty minutes from the
station to work.

By the way, in an ideal world (my version), the netbook I'm carrying
would not be a lenovo Intel. It wouldn't even be a cold-fire or
ARM-based unit. It'd be running a port of Linux or one of the BSDs on
a swarm of Forth processors.

And nothing but the currently active apps would keep state in RAM,
which would save huge time on hibernate and restore, because you
wouldn't be trying to dump and restore the entire system RAM. (Maybe
there's a hint in there as to why your experience with hibernate seems
to have you thinking you don't want to do that.)

>>> compared with a full boot between 10 and 30 seconds (30
>>> seconds with a LOT of services like mail, www, mysql...)
>>
>> The Gimp?
>
> GIMP starts in around 5 seconds on recent machines

Modulo your definition of recent. But you missed the point.

LibreOffice, Inkscape, whatever. If I power down the netbook before I
get off the train, I have to save whatever I'm working on and quit the
apps. (Yeah, actually, I've broken the gimp out and worked a little on
graphics on the train once or twice.) That takes time. Then, after I
boot back up, I have to open whatever it was I was working on, both
starting the apps and loading the documents.

With suspend or hibernate, yeah, it's safest to save, but I don't have
to quit. And I don't have to start the apps back up after booting back
up.

By the way, even at home, running the 40W netbook all day long would
cost about half of what we spend on lighting for the month. It adds
up, and in Japan, it's not as cheap as some other places.

I am glad you find you don't need hibernate or suspend.

But this thread started with someone talking about kernel devs that
want to get rid of suspend and hibernate. If they did remove those
from the kernel, I would need something to replace them.

--
Joel Rees