Linux 5.10 Will Be Able To Hibernate + Resume Much Faster

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.10 Will Be Able To Hibernate + Resume Much Faster

If you frequently put your system(s) through hibernation cycles, the performance should be much better beginning with the soon-to-start Linux 5.10 cycle...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.10-Faster-Hibernate

[pranav]

Wow.

Does this mean I can simply hibernate without any tweaks/installation in Ubuntu 21.04?

[kcrudup]

Don't count on a big improvement if you're already on solid-state storage and a recent kernel; I have this commit in my current kernel and it's not even perceptively faster. No slight on the commit's author, but I'm pretty sure that pulling in ~20-30GB of RAM in ~10 seconds even before this patch is pegging my NVMe drive.

[polarathene]

Don't count on a big improvement if you're already on solid-state storage and a recent kernel; I have this commit in my current kernel and it's not even perceptively faster. No slight on the commit's author, but I'm pretty sure that pulling in ~20-30GB of RAM in ~10 seconds even before this patch is pegging my NVMe drive.

You only tested against an NVMe SSD? There still might be benefit to those on SATA based SSDs, which not only have the lower ~550MB/s peak sequential I/O but much less I/O threads/depth-queues IIRC. Best case for those at 16GB of RAM would be over 30 seconds? (Maybe less with compression if that's faster to run than directly writing to disk memory pages), presumably that would be a longer process atm, but I haven't hibernated in a long time (I don't particularly trust it after enough bad experiences).

[NateHubbard]

Do servers need hibernation?!

That depends on the type of server you're talking about. If it's a web server, then no probably not. If it's a file server, then maybe.

[kcrudup]

You only tested against an NVMe SSD?

It's all I've got 😁

but I haven't hibernated in a long time (I don't particularly trust it after enough bad experiences).

Huh. It's been literal decades since I've had issues with Hibernate on Linux; it's even more reliable than Suspend is. Try it again, you may be surprised.

[jabl]

Do servers need hibernation?!

AWS apparently wants to support hibernating spot instances. See https://lwn.net/Articles/821158/. Also this patch was contributed by an Amazon employee.

[Guest]

Wow.

Does this mean I can simply hibernate without any tweaks/installation in Ubuntu 21.04?

Well you'll still need a swap file/partition set up. I don't know how distros handle that. I use Arch, BTW, so I set it up manually.

Also there may still be problems with device drivers. For example, I recently found and fixed a bug where my Hawaii card's power management wasn't enabled after hibernate and resume, so there may be gotchas like that for other devices (or worse bugs that crash your system).

[Guest]

You only tested against an NVMe SSD? There still might be benefit to those on SATA based SSDs, which not only have the lower ~550MB/s peak sequential I/O but much less I/O threads/depth-queues IIRC. Best case for those at 16GB of RAM would be over 30 seconds? (Maybe less with compression if that's faster to run than directly writing to disk memory pages), presumably that would be a longer process atm, but I haven't hibernated in a long time (I don't particularly trust it after enough bad experiences).

Yeah, I have a desktop with 16 GB of RAM and the swap partition is on a SATA SSD. I haven't measured, but 30 seconds sounds about right. I'm also wondering whether this change will improve the speed for me.

[Mez']

It's all I've got 😁


Huh. It's been literal decades since I've had issues with Hibernate on Linux; it's even more reliable than Suspend is. Try it again, you may be surprised.

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.