Re: Hibernation considerations

From: david
Date: Tue Jul 17 2007 - 17:50:30 EST


On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

On Tuesday, 17 July 2007 22:53, david@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

On Tuesday, 17 July 2007 22:18, david@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

Now, with that in mind, ACPI requires us to make the system enter the S4 sleep
state as a result of the hibernation procedure. In my opinion this may be done
after saving the image, but still this means, for example, that the
image-saving kernel needs to support ACPI.

Next, during the restore, we should first check if the image is present (and
valid) _without_ turning ACPI on (note that this is not done by the current
hibernation code and that leads to strange problems on some systems). Then,
if the image is present (and valid), we should first load it, jump to the
hibernated kernel and _then_ turn ACPI on and execute the _BFS and
_WAK ACPI global methods (again, this is not done by the current code in that
order, which is wrong). Only after that is the hibernated kernel supposed to
continue.

[Please refer to section 15.3 of the 3.0b ACPI spec for details.]

you are starting from the assumption that ACPI S4 mode should be used.

I'm saying that a suspend that uses ACPI S4 mode is fundamentally
different from one that does a power off instead.

It is different, but not fundamentally.

from my point of view the ACPI S4 sleep mode has far more in common with
suspend-to-ram then with the suspend-to-disk that I'm talking about

non-ACPI hibernate

since the box powers off
it uses zero power while suspended
another OS could be run before a resume
hardware can be swapped, suspend image could be sent around the world to be restored on another system.
restore makes no assumptions about the state of the hardware when it is restored
restore is slower (full BIOS boot is required)
should be able to work on just about any hardware (the limit is the ability to initialize the devices)


ACPI suspends

since the box never completely powers off:
a complete power failure breaks the suspend
the OS must remain in control so other uses must be prevented.
hardware must remain in the ACPI state from suspend until restore.
restore can be faster (some initialization may be able to be skipped)
requires ACPI hardware support

under the catagory of ACPI suspends you have

fast suspend-to-ram (stop scheduling, put the CPU to sleep, as long as
the memory keeps getting refreshed)
slow suspend-to-ram (stop scheduling, put as much of the hardware as
possible to sleep, including spinning down disks and other things that
take a while to undo)
suspend-to-disk (stop scheduleing, copy the ram somewhere so that it
doesn't need to be refreshed, put everything into low-power mode)

and there are probably quite a few others as well. but they are all in
the same family in that you have to worry about ACPI states, and they all
have the same restrictions on what can happen between suspend and resume

the non-ACPI hibernate behaves very differently, and for some people (and
I think I am one of them) it will meet their needs better then _any_ of
the ACPI suspends.

OTOH, there are many people who would want the ACPI suspends to be handled
and they don't really care for the power-off-only hibernation.

If you aren't going to support the ACPI hibernation, your framework will be
incomplete and therefore not generally useful.

if you make the framework limited by the ACPI requriement, your framework
will not be able to be used in all cases and is therefor incomplete and
not generally useful.

see, I can make authoritative sounding declarations too. :-)

Well, being able to support ACPI need not imply being unable to work in the
other cases. Conversely, being able to work in non-ACPI cases need not imply
being unable to support ACPI. Hence, you can support ACPI and be able to
work in the other cases at the same time.

Try again. ;-)

I thought it was you who was saying that the restore operation requried ACPI if you used ACPI at all.

I agree that some people want ACPI suspends, but you don't seem to allow
the fact that some people don't,

No, I do.

What I'm trying to say is that we should support the ACPI S4 transition and
resume, which DOES NOT MEAN that we should support ONLY that.

it has sounded like you are saying that if you support ACPI S4 sleep then it's incompatible with powering off.

and those people don't want to have the ACPI based limits.

There are NO ACPI LIMITS! There only are things that you need to implement
if you're going to support ACPI, but they need not be used ALWAYS, no?

yes there are limits. the fact that you can't remove the battery in S4 mode without messing things up is a limit, the fact that it's against ACPI specs to boot another OS before resume is a limit. you seem to keep pointing out requirements of ACPI that limit what can be done. I do not disagree about these being requirements _if you are useing ACPI_, but if you don't need ACPI they should not limit you.

they _especially_ don't want those limits when it appears as if supporting
those limits is what's preventing their much simpler case from working
reliably.

I strongly suspect that the majority of users don't care about ACPI, they
want to be able to pause and resume their machine. they may want a couple
options for how fast the resume is (trading resume speed against how much
power the system eats), but the deep sleep modes (suspend-to-disk,
hibernate) probably have restore times that are close enough to each other
that very few people would care enough to opt for a ACPI S4 mode that
won't survive a loss of battery power over a non-ACPI mode that would.

Please don't argue like that, these are not arguments for avoiding the ACPI
support. Arguably, you can support _both_ ACPI and non-ACPI hibernation, so
design for being able to support both. End of story (as far as I'm concerned).

I wish I understood how you are saying this, becouse it does not match what I thought I have been reading for the last few days.

David Lang
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/