Re: Activity!

Am 14.12.2011 22:15, schrieb Piotr Karbowski:
> On 14.12.2011 13:34, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
>> Hi all.
>>
>> Some of you may have already noticed that I've pushed an update to
>> git.tuxonice.net. Please be weary of using it at the moment - I'm still
>> testing and debugging, and there are a couple of changes I want to look
>> at more closely. I hope to have more time to work on this tomorrow
>> night. Failing that, it should happen the day after because I'm back to
>> 4 days a week at work now (glad of that - I can get other things done
>> again!).
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Nigel
>
> Glad to hear that. I am really happy that tuxonice is not dead project!
> I tried the in-kernel suspend and it was horrible, random freezing
> system, sometimes it frozen while suspending, sometimes on resuming.
> With Tuxonice I don't remember one single freeze since a year or more!
>
> -- Piotr.

Yeah, great news! I am a long-time tuxonice user. However, I've been 
using in-kernel suspend since 3.2-rc releases now, in lack of updates 
and because I didn't have the time to make tuxonice work. Here are my 
experiences with in-kernel suspend:

* Does not work on an older pentium4 with only 3gib ram at all, maybe 
because of additional hardware connected/installed. That was some time 
ago, I could retry and see how good it got in the meanwhile. Tuxonice 
works fine though.

* Works without issues on up-to-date hardware with plenty of ram 
(16gib), not failing once.

* Sometimes does not hibernate on a laptop with 4gib ram. Could be 
related to driver or rc status though.

* It seems to me that it needs longer to start writing the image, but 
writing the image is quite fast.

* No progress display during hibernation. Output at resuming is ok 
though, not as nice as tuxonice-userui, but good enough for me.

* Image size and extra pages can be configured now. This is a necessity, 
especially for the machine with 16gib ram. I don't want to reserve 
6-8gib swap which is mostly unused except for hibernating.

* Not an option for machines that don't have a lot of memory. there it 
starts to swap to free enough memory which sucks a lot.

* When the machine crashes during hibernation, all you see is a black 
screen. Really great for debugging.


Here are some drawbacks of tuxonice:

* Cannot apply Con Koliva's bfs patch, they break compression. This 
really sucks. I've applied bfs and bfq patches to mainline head, and 
they are quite an improvement, especially on the laptop. The only 
solution would be to not use image compression which is not an option.

* Laptop special keys (thinkvantage button, fn keys) stopped working 
after hibernating and resuming (lenovo t400). They work fine with 
in-kernel suspend, in fact they start working again when suspending (not 
hibernating) and resuming. (Could have been fixed by newer kernel, not a 
tuxonice issue? On the other hand there have been no changes to the 
module for quite some time IIRC.)


Advantages of tuxonice:

* Always stable and reliable wherever I tested it. When it didn't, 
in-kernel suspend would not work either.

* Can write images greater than 1/2 of total memory.

* Fast and configurable.

* Debugging output.

* Nice progress display.

* I may decide to reboot while writing the image. What a convenience! I 
use that very often when dual-booting.

* Hybrid mode (hibernation and suspend).

* You could use fbsplash and get a really nice tuxonice theme. I did 
never spend the time to set that up.

* Great community!

* Great support!


All in all, the kernel devs did a great job with in-kernel suspend, but 
it's still not quite on a par with tuxonice in some important aspects.

I wish you fun with hacking and thanks for your great support so far, Nigel.

Regards,
Harald

-- 
`Experience is the best teacher.'