Enable hibernation

[Jason DeRose]

Excuse the top-post, but I wanted to quickly chime in from the OEM perspective on this (System76).

Suspend is quite difficult to support from an OEM perspective, and personally I'm glad it's not exposed in the UI.

It's a confluence of 3 things that have become problematic:

1) Systems with a lot of RAM 
2) Systems with a smallish SSD
3) What if a customer installs more RAM themselves?

We sell a lot of laptops with 16GiB of RAM, and a lot of desktops with 32GiB of RAM, but those same systems often ship with a 120GB or 240GB SSD for the system drive. And when you consider the case of a customer installing more RAM on their own, you really should make the swap partition sized to the maximum amount of RAM a system could take. Burning 32GiB on a 120GB SSD doesn't make for a good impression with the customer (why is my SSD smaller than it should be?). Same problem exists with Intel Rapid Start. A swap file (instead of swap partition) would solve this, but personally I'd still prefer to keep suspend hidden.

Anyway, now that we don't need to worry about suspend, System76 ships its products with a fixed 4 GiB swap partition, regardless of what the installed amount of RAM is (or what the maximum installable amount of RAM is). We've been doing this since Raring, so far without any customer complaints or support issues around this choice.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Langasek" <steve.langasek at ubuntu.com>
To: "Phillip Susi" <psusi at ubuntu.com>
Cc: kernel-team at lists.ubuntu.com, technical-board at lists.ubuntu.com
Sent: Friday, January 3, 2014 2:50:32 PM
Subject: Re: Enable hibernation

Hi Phillip,

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 11:51:54AM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1

> Bug #812394 disabled the hibernate menu option by default.  Given the
> number of people commenting in the bug and the popularity of questions
> on askubuntu how to turn it back on, I believe this was a serious
> mistake and should be reversed.

> I would like the technical board to review any reasons for why this
> feature that many people rely on should not be enabled by default.

Now that the tech board has been reconsituted, I suppose we should address
this. :)

The hibernate menu option was disabled because it was exposed in many cases
where hibernate would not work reliably.  Indeed, I was recently trying to
make pm-hibernate work for me on the commandline in trusty (because my
machine seems to be in its death throes and suspend no longer works reliably
for me), and found that, even though I have a 6GB swap partition and 4GB of
RAM, I am consistently unable to hibernate here (I think kernel changes wrt
dm-crypt may be to blame).

I don't think we should have a menu option exposed by default which will
fail to work for a large number of users (in most cases, after first
churning the disk for a minute or two).  And at the time this decision was
made, there were not resources to make this menu option work *reliably* in
Ubuntu.

I know it's a feature that power users value, but I think the technical
rationale for removing the option was valid, and still applies today.  I
think a precondition for reintroducing the option to the menu should be to
resolve the reliability problems that led to its removal in the first place
(including the problem of systems having insufficient swap allocation), and
to get the buy-in from the kernel team (cc:ed) that it will be supportable
in the future.

Thanks,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org

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