Linux 5.10 Will Be Able To Hibernate + Resume Much Faster

[anarki2]

I'd be happy with just slow hibernation already lol... never got it to work.

[Slartifartblast]

Given the speed from cold boot of modern SSDs is hibernate relevant anymore ?

Suspend to RAM yes but hibernate and a tonne of unnecessary SSD writes, no thanks.

[caligula]

Given the speed from cold boot of modern SSDs is hibernate relevant anymore ?

Suspend to RAM yes but hibernate and a tonne of unnecessary SSD writes, no thanks.

It's a bigger issue when you have 64 to 128 GB of RAM and run tons of virtual machines / docker containers. Suspending each of them involves lots of snapshots and shuffling of state.

[polarathene]

Suspend is completely reliable.
I have 60 days of uptime on 2 machines (desktop and laptop, running Ubuntu and Manjaro), which means a minimum of 120 suspend/resume (every night) and probably closer to 200 (everytime I go somewhere). 200 times without a single issue.

Completely reliable for you.

My laptop consistently fails to resume after the 2nd suspend since a boot, kernel panics and needs to be rebooted. That's a firmware issue IIRC and has potentially been fixed by the vendor but requires me to install Windows to update the firmware..

I haven't used many other machines besides my desktop and laptop for past few years, but I know in 2016 with Arch quite a few personal and work systems didn't play well with hibernate or suspend. My desktop I think I last hibernated in 2017 as shutting it down wasn't desirable but I needed to move it to another location. I waited and waited for 10-20 mins or so, pretty sure it had an SSD too, but it wasn't shutting down or triggering a failure to hibernate, I think I just hard powered it off. Then the system wouldn't even power on, needed a new PSU, great timing ha.

Hibernation might be fine now, but not practical as the desktop is presently stuck on 128GB SATA SSD with 4GB SWAP and a similar amount of free disk space left, but 32GB RAM (I'm often in the 16-24GB usage), usual uptime is 2-3 months before I do an update and reboot unless there was a kernel panic or power cut. Both systems run Manjaro, laptop has an NVMe SSD and does hibernate / resume fine, I'm not terribly concerned if that fails and does a fresh boot though like I would be with my desktop.

[polarathene]

Given the speed from cold boot of modern SSDs is hibernate relevant anymore ?

Suspend to RAM yes but hibernate and a tonne of unnecessary SSD writes, no thanks.

On my 4GB budget laptop hibernate works well. It has an NVMe SSD and with the low RAM it's pretty quick to hibernate and resume. It's not able to suspend/resume reliably at present.

I don't need to hibernate it that often and the SSD has pretty decent endurance AFAIK, so not really that big of a concern with the writes. I can leave it like that for several months and it'll resume fine with plenty of battery not having been charged. But if I suspend that battery drains away, only lasts a few days like that I think (would be longer if it could enter deeper sleep states, but that's budget hardware for you I guess).

[oiaohm]

My laptop consistently fails to resume after the 2nd suspend since a boot, kernel panics and needs to be rebooted. That's a firmware issue IIRC and has potentially been fixed by the vendor but requires me to install Windows to update the firmware..

All laptops that officially support Linux being installed either have firmware update by EFI menu from at fat32 formatted usb key or freedos firmware installer or have a Linux firmware installer so no windows should be required. There are quite a few laptops out there that officially support Linux. Yes laptops in every price bracket and quality yes some of those you would buy with windows and convert to Linux. I am sorry I have no mercy for you. You have chosen either not to-do your homework on how to install firmware on that laptop or bought laptop that officially does not support Linux.

Something horrible here I run into windows laptops with odd issues with Windows that turn out to be firmware linked. I recommend people buying even for windows laptops the laptops on the Linux supported list from vendors. It avoids having the custom Windows driver masking over a firmware fault that breaks on a windows update so bricking the device in the field.. Laptop having trouble having Linux installed can fairly much can giving you smoke signal of possible future Windows problems with that laptop.

[Danny3]

I don't need it faster, I need it working.
On Kubuntu 20.04+ the whole Hibernate menu entry is missing and I tried once to jump through hoops to enable it, but I managed only to get the menu entry showing, but it was not hibernating.
I guess Ubuntu devs are too busy to change themes and wallpapers on every release instead of fixing important stuff like this.

[polarathene]

Yes laptops in every price bracket and quality yes some of those you would buy with windows and convert to Linux. I am sorry I have no mercy for you. You have chosen either not to-do your homework on how to install firmware on that laptop or bought laptop that officially does not support Linux.

I did my homework on what was the best available laptop at that price bracket. I wanted AMD but for the price I got at the time(Jan 1st 2020) it wasn't as good of an offer. The laptop was a 2019Q4 model, came with latest Intel CometLake, which from past experiences with recent hardware release purchases in the past I was aware there would be some risk, until the 5.6 kernel I think there was some graphic corruption as the intel driver support just wasn't quite there. In hindsight, if I had waited a few more months I could have got the much nicer Zen 4xxx models for not much more, or a TigerLake would have had some notable advantages too.

Acer Aspire A515-54, purchased on Amazon at the time for $399 USD(+90 USD for shipping and tax in my country): https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Display-...dp/B07XPLHL3K/

It seems they raised the price to $600 USD now, probably for Black Friday "special" coming up ha. Acer has two models with FWUPD support IIRC, but are still on the fence as an evaluating vendor. I needed something at the time for an overseas trip (that got cancelled due to Covid-19..), the other models in that budget back then were worse spec wise, even 4GB was difficult IIRC, and now we can get 8/16GB around that budget? The NVMe SSD, 802.11ax wireless, spare SO-DIMM slot for adding up to 16GB RAM and spare SATA 2.5" bay made for an appealing choice.

Displays in that budget are often lacking, but it has a 15.6" 1080p IPS with better nits/contrast than competing products back then (this was an important choice for me to not skimp on), build quality was decent (only top/lid section is aluminum I think, but the plastic bottom doesn't feel cheap), good ventiliation/cooling (some competitors were reportedly quite loud, and this wasn't something I wanted to deal with), decent battery life (AMD wasn't able to compete with this with the 3xxxU series, 4xxx is apparently pretty decent), battery life was quite important since I wanted to make the most of it on my 13 hours stuck in a plane + before/after when possible. Likewise a keyboard/touchpad experience that wasn't going to be as bad as I'd come across elsewhere was another important consideration, functional things rather than specs or OS compatibility had higher value.

I wasn't able to check all the boxes, I wanted USB-C charging, but models offering that lacked elsewhere, this still came with USB-C + some USB 3 ports so it was alright. I later learned that the display protocol used was from around 2011-2012, I've mentioned it on the forums a few times but the desired protocol version came out the following year of the one I got and this display panel was manufactured in 2017, none of that would be easy to find out online though until I had the hardware physically (these details are left out intentionally AFAIK since most consumers won't care and it allows flexibility to swap what's used in future production runs). Fortunately I've learned that for around 100USD or so I can replace that with what I'd want and enjoy better power savings.

I also took the vendors into account and product reviews of that and many others from various communities (not just Amazon reviews, but places like reddit and here). This was pretty much the top of my budget, and possibly going over a little I think, I had reasonable confidence that Linux would work, and it does, for now it just needs to hibernate instead of suspend which is totally fine.

What would you have chosen? How would you go about finding official linux support for a recent device at that budget? What sort of tradeoffs would I have had to make? Buying from Amazon wasn't great for support, while Linux wasn't an issue for Acer, they did want me to send it to US/Canada (from NZ) to be looked at/replaced, and they'd only accept a US return address, so beyond 6-8 weeks I'd be without it, it wouldn't as smooth of a process to get back to my country, even though they've got local facilities here for some reason buying from overseas meant the local branches weren't permitted. Local stores btw sell these for a fair bit more (this particular model wasn't available), stuff at a similar price I paid here was abysmal.

[arQon]

I'm in the same position as Mez' - my HTPC gets a kernel update MAYBE once a quarter at most, and goes through literally hundreds of suspend/resume cycles between each reboot, with no problems at all, and has done so for what must be close to 8 years now.

Hibernate is one of those things that I have almost no interest in. Despite the apparently popularity of it among DEs, many of which now not only make it the default but make it hard to turn the damn thing off, it's a pretty bad way to handle the pauses between sessions: it's slow, and will remain slow even with this patch; and for most users the vast majority of the data they're hibernating is cold to begin with.

On a laptop, there's almost no merit to using it over suspend. 2 seconds plus 0.001% battery drain, vs a minute or more plus a day's worth of writes to the drive? I'll take suspend every time, thanks. Same on a desktop, as long as you have a UPS.

IMO, hibernate really only has value when you have a seriously "busy" system (lots of apps / VMs / containers / whatever) AND that system is in an environment where the power can't be trusted. Other than that, it's just a really bad way of solving a problem that was already long-since solved.

Since the slowness of hibernate is one of its two big negatives though, this patch does represent a huge improvement. I still don't have any use for it, but it'll suck a whole lot less for the people who do, even if many of them would still probably be better off not using it in the first place.

[kcrudup]

Given the speed from cold boot of modern SSDs is hibernate relevant anymore?

I don't hibernate for quick bootup, I hibernate so I don't have to start from scratch.

My machine (Dell XPS 13 2-in-1) is set up to go into (S3) sleep when I close the lid, then if I haven't awakened within 4 hrs, hibernate. (My laptop's BIOS is one of those "Modern Suspend" ones and although it's got a proper S3, it seems to use a lot more standby current than my old S3-enable laptop, hence the hybrid suspend.)