Re: [PATCH 1/2] Documentation: clarify limitations of hibernation

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Mon Jan 06 2020 - 07:54:04 EST


On Thu 26-12-19 14:02:04, Luigi Semenzato wrote:
[...]
> +Limitations of Hibernation
> +==========================
> +
> +When entering hibernation, the kernel tries to allocate a chunk of memory large
> +enough to contain a copy of all pages in use, to use it for the system
> +snapshot. If the allocation fails, the system cannot hibernate and the
> +operation fails with ENOMEM. This will happen, for instance, when the total
> +amount of anonymous pages (process data) exceeds 1/2 of total RAM.
> +
> +One possible workaround (besides terminating enough processes) is to force
> +excess anonymous pages out to swap before hibernating. This can be achieved
> +with memcgroups, by lowering memory usage limits with ``echo <new limit> >
> +/dev/cgroup/memory/<group>/memory.mem.usage_in_bytes``. However, the latter
> +operation is not guaranteed to succeed.

I am not familiar with the hibernation process much. But what prevents
those allocations to reclaim memory and push out the anonymous memory to
the swap on demand during the hibernation's allocations?
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs