Fedora 10 - Boot Analysis

[Chuck Anderson]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 01:17:42AM -0500, James Antill wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 22:21 -0500, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 07:11:47PM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-12-17 at 03:02 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > > (Humour. This is a genuinely difficult problem and one that inovolves 
> > > > basically rearchitecting the current implementation)
> > > 
> > > HibernateKit ?
> > 
> > Writing 4 gigs of RAM to swap at 20 meg/sec = 1 minute 25 seconds.  I 
> > don't see much way around this.
> 
>  Why would you need to do that? I mean I can understand that it's
> probably "easy" to do it that way ... but how much harder is it to do:
> 
> 1. Write all the dirty pages to swap/disk.
> 
> 2. Drop all the clean droppable pages.
> 
> 3. write out what's left.

Oh, it probably does like you say.  Maybe it's only 2 gigs then.  It 
still takes on the order of 2 minutes to hibernate, and even longer 
than that for resume including swapping back in after the strict 
resume part is done.  Maybe hibernate-to-flash would be fast enough to 
make it worthwhile.

The main reason I hibernate is to save the state of what I was working 
on before.  Rebooting could be a solution to this if:

- Rebooting is fast enough.  This is what this thread is about.

- Applications were written to save state as a matter of normal 
operation.  Firefox is pretty good at this these days.  See also 
"Crash-Only Software" [1].

- gnome-session didn't break session saving support, or Fedora didn't 
consume the broken GNOME release with 
known-to-be-broken-session-support [2], and 
we-wont-fix-this-until-the-resdesign-of-session-support-is-done 
[3][4].


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552387
[3] http://live.gnome.org/SessionManagement/NewGnomeSession
[4] http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2008/03/08/session-management/