Shall we hide the GUI for Hibernate in Natty?

[Chow Loong Jin]

On Thursday 03,February,2011 07:22 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On 31/01/11 21:57, Steve Langasek wrote:
>> If the hardware supports resuming from suspend when the battery is
>> critically low, this Just Works with no input from Ubuntu.  Then
> 
> FWIW I think this is an awful idea. If my laptop is suspended, it's in
> my bag. Waking it up while it's in my bag and doing a bunch of hard work
> means it's going to get very hot. Any mistakes mean it's going to sit
> there all night/flight until it runs out of battery or the CPU melts. My
> experience with unexplained in-bag resume events suggests that the CPU
> overheating point comes first. I would much rather lose some state than
> physically damage my hardware!
> 
> I would suggest we copy the strategy used by certain proprietary vendors
> - give the appearance of suspending quickly (i.e. turn the video off),
> then write out RAM to disk, then actually suspend.
> Given the potentially unreliable nature of suspending and the time
> required to write out several GB of RAM, perhaps this 'advanced' suspend
> should only be enabled by default on certified hardware.

Actually, this approach suffers from the same issue you highlighted:- The user
does not know that the laptop is not quite done writing stuff to the disk yet,
and stuffs it into the bag. In the bag, it gets hot and potentially suffers from
a meltdown.

Even if the laptop does not overheat in the bag, it probably gets picked up
while still writing stuff to disk, and gets treated to a lot of movement
(walking, running, climbing steps, etc.), which can shorten the hard disk life
considerably. SSDs are an exception to this, of course.

From what I have seen, though, this is how Windows 7 does things, and I don't
quite like the idea.

On the other hand, we seem to have a pm-suspend-hybrid, which, looking at
pm-utils' code in /usr/lib/pm-utils/pm-functions, defaults to suspending for 15
minutes (waking up using the RTC clock), and then hibernating if not woken up by
the user.

TuxOnIce seems to support true pm-suspend-hybrid though, as does uswsusp. True
pm-suspend-hybrid being -- write RAM to disk, then suspend-to-RAM. I'm not sure
how well it works, though.

-- 
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

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