Hibernation fails

[Mario Vukelic]

On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 18:21 +0100, Steve Flynn wrote:
> You have me confused now. I referred to the email from Rafael to the
> LKML (viewable here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/14004) and focused on
> the fact that suspend to hibernation was currently implemented.
> However, it seems upon re-reading that I may have jumped the gun.
> 
> "Saving and loading the hibernation image
> 
> The hibernation image is saved in a swap partition or in a swap file
> in step (16)[...]

I see where the confusion comes from.

The kernel can be configured to use a swap partition or a swap file (or
both, I think). Hence, if a swap file is used the hibernation image is
written to the swap file, but otherwise it is written to the swap
partition.

Unfortunately, the Ubuntu kernel uses a swap partition, for reasons I
never understood. A swap partition is marginally faster due to
circumventing file system code, but otherwise I would think that a swap
file would be a much better fit for Ubuntu's target users, at least in
the Desktop edition, as swap files don't need a predetermined size.

However, I am certainly not a kernel guru and there may be reasons to
prefer a swap partition that I don't know about.

> [...] It also is only capable of using swap space (ie.
> swap partitions or swap files) for saving hibernation images [...]

As I said :)

> Bugger! :)

Indeed.