LG Has Been Working On Reduced Boot Times With Hibernation Optimizations

LG Electronics has been exploring improvements around hibernation/suspend-to-disk to speed-up the Linux boot process for consumer electronics rather than performing cold boots and as part of that is working towards upstream optimizations.

While hibernation-based booting is generally quicker than performing cold boots, suspending to disk does yield extra writes to the NAND flash memory on these consumer devices and that is one of the things they are seeking to avoid. So it's been an effort not only to speed-up the hibernation boot process but also reducing the amount of data that needs to be written out to the flash storage.

LG Electronics' Kyungsik Lee presented at this week's Open-Source Summit North America 2019 on their efforts in this area. Going from a cold boot to a hibernation-based boot meant the boot time dropped from about 15 seconds to 11 seconds. But after optimizing that hibernation boot process they lowered it to under eight seconds. As for the hibernation image size, the image size went from over 900MB to just over 200MB.

The much smaller image size that needs to hit the NAND flash can be thanked to data deduplication, log-structured block management, clearing the page cache, and compression.

Those wanting to learn more about LG's hibernation boot optimizations can see this slide deck (PDF).