Hibernating Ubuntu on EBS boot EC2 instances

[Eric Hammond]

Amazon EC2 has the ability to run "EBS boot AMIs" which keep a
persistent root disk[1].  This lets a user shutdown (stop) and boot
(start) a server without losing the contents of the root disk.

There have been a number of people inquiring about the possibility of
enhancing the Ubuntu on EC2 image so that during the stop/start cycle
they can hibernate/resume as an alternative to shutdown/boot.

I see there was some interest a while ago in getting hibernate to work
with Eucalyptus[2].

What steps would need to be taken to propose hibernate support be
investigated for EC2, perhaps in the upcoming "M" cycle since it might
be too late for Lucid?

Technical notes: Since hibernation cannot be done to the EC2 swap
partition (not persistent) and (I think) hibernation cannot be done to a
swap file on an active file system, this probably means that an
additional EBS volume will need to be attached for swap (not difficult)
or the main EBS volume will need to be split into multiple partitions
for root and swap.

[1]http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/12/03/amazon-ec2-instances-now-can-boot-from-amazon-ebs/
[2]https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerKarmicCloudPowerManagement

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Eric Hammond