[ltp] FC3 / Swsusp

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Christopher Hubbell wrote:

>> You might want to check the following thread:
>> http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-October/msg01369.html
>
> I've read the ominous threads talking about its immaturity.  Yes, I still 
> want to be able to make my system suspend to disk.  My Windows 2000 
> environment has no trouble doing this and it drives me nutty not being able 
> to make use of my hardware in Linux.  I've seen plenty of people posting to 
> this alias who happily use swsusp, so I know it's possible.

Yes, certainly possible, and well worth it in my opinion.  I
understand that the Fedora project don't want to package swsusp2,
which is still in a state of flux, and the very occasional report of
corruption does appear on the kernel lists with respect to the
original version of swsusp1, already in the kernel.  I've used both
on my T40 and have had no such problems.  So it's understandable I
guess from Fedora's point of view - but it does leave users wanting
suspend-to-disk with ACPI in a difficult position: forced to go for
a non-Fedora kernel if they want it, while the prevailing philosophy
for 2.6 is to go for vendor kernels.  I see suspend-to-disk as a core
need for a laptop user, particularly in the light of the considerable
power consumption of ACPI S3 (suspend-to-ram) on thinkpads.

What frustrates me is that swsusp1 (the old, in-kernel version)
didn't even compile in the Fedora kernels when I last tried, whereas
of course if does in kernel.org's.  If they really want to disable
it, it should be removed in one of Fedora's kernel patches, maybe.
Caveat: I haven't tried compiling swsusp1 in the FC3 kernels yet.

Anyway, I'd suggest you go for swsusp2.  It's lightning fast compared
to APM BIOS suspend-to-disk, gives more feedback than swsusp1, is a
more or less complete rewrite, and handles unloading of problematic
modules and all sorts of things via its hibernate script.  It'll be
incorporated in the kernel one of these days(/months/years!).

Up until now I've been patching this into vanilla kernel.org kernels
- no problem with 2.6.9.  But yesterday as a result of your message,
I talked to one of the swsusp2 developers, who kindly took a look at
the latest FC3 Fedora patched kernel.  His conclusion was that making
the swsusp2 patches apply to the Fedora kernel should be easy, and he
produced a couple of pre-patches for me to try - I will do this in
the next day or so when I install FC3.  If you're interested, this
might (arguably) be a neater route, as you can keep the Fedora
projects other kernel patches too.

Would Fedora users here be interested in such patches if they work?
I imagine if there was some interest, it would encourage the swsusp2
developers to keep them up to date.

Honey