Re: Hibernation Redesign

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Jeremy Maitin-Shepard wrote:
> Al Boldi <a1426z@gawab.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>Pavel Machek wrote:
>>
>>>We are stuck with refrigerator for now, and at least for hibernation,
>>>I don't see any feasible alternative.
> 
> 
>>Feasible alternative?
> 
> 
> I posted such an alternative to the list a short time ago: hibenrating
> from a *new* kernel space/user space that is created by loading a new
> kernel in a manner similar to what is done for kexec crashdumps.  Unlike
> kexec crashdumps, however, it would not require reserving any memory at
> boot, because the necessary memory (maybe 16MB or 64MB) can be freed
> just before hibernating, and device drivers can be properly stopped so
> that DMAs don't stomp over certain memory.

This is the Morton method, isn't it? :) I remember it sounding like a
very good idea when he brought it up, but I can't remember the details
of why it was rejected or what the problems were.


> This approach eliminates the need for the freezer, as it would make
> hibernate look a lot a bit like suspend to ram from the perspective of
> the "old" kernel (the kernel being hibernated), as the hibernate
> operation itself would be completely atomic from the perspective of the
> "old" kernel.  That is not to say, of course, that any code paths would
> actually be shared, or that the drivers would do the same things
> (because they probably would not).

Well it basically is suspend to RAM with the additional step that a
new kernel gets booted and writes out the data from RAM to disk then
shuts down. I suspect that freeing memory on the fly for the new kernel
would be non-trivial (but possible), however simply having a reserve
RAM region for the new kernel would be fine for a first step.

-- 
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.