Shall we hide the GUI for Hibernate in Natty?

[Phillip Susi]

On 2/22/2011 10:44 AM, Chow Loong Jin wrote:
> My previously mentioned point still stands though. Many people close the lid of
> the laptop, stick it into a bag, and start walking. Considering the I/O
> intensive nature of the hibernation process, that practice can damage the hard
> disk pretty much.

Laptop hard disks are generally built to withstand this.  Whenever my
wife moves her macbook around too much I can hear the distinctive click
of the emergency head unload.  This also is of course, not an issue when
the default lid action is to suspend rather than hibernate.

> The gauge isn't broken. Well, not completely, anyway. The only issue is that it
> jumps from 5% directly to 0% without passing 4%-1%. But on the other hand, while
> there's enough power to last for half a day without running out of battery,
> there isn't always enough power to finish hibernation before it keels over and
> dies (starting from 0%).

It sounds like it is estimating 5% remaining capacity, then realizes
that, based on the terminal voltage, the battery is actually dead.
Hence, it needs a good calibration cycle.

> But like I said, this is mostly due to
> the current hibernation implementation in Linux taking too long to stuff the RAM
> into the swap. A quicker, more reliable implementation would do the trick.

That certainly would be nice.

> But anyway, back on topic: I don't believe we should get rid of the hibernation
> option. Suspend and hibernate have very important differences, and both of them
> have their own fair share of use-cases.

Agreed.