Re: [PATCH v2] mm: Enable suspend-only swap spaces

[Michal Hocko]

On Mon 12-07-21 09:41:26, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 12.07.21 09:03, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > [Cc linux-api]
> > 
> > On Fri 09-07-21 10:50:48, Evan Green wrote:
> > > Currently it's not possible to enable hibernation without also enabling
> > > generic swap for a given swap area. These two use cases are not the
> > > same. For example there may be users who want to enable hibernation,
> > > but whose drives don't have the write endurance for generic swap
> > > activities.
> > > 
> > > Add a new SWAP_FLAG_NOSWAP that adds a swap region but refuses to allow
> > > generic swapping to it. This region can still be wired up for use in
> > > suspend-to-disk activities, but will never have regular pages swapped to
> > > it.
> > 
> > Could you expand some more on why a strict exclusion is really
> > necessary? I do understand that one might not want to have swap storage
> > available all the time but considering that swapon is really a light
> > operation so something like the following should be a reasonable
> > workaround, no?
> > 	swapon storage/file
> > 	s2disk
> > 	swapoff storage
> 
> I'm certainly not a hibernation expert, but I'd guess this can also be
> triggered by HW events, so from the kernel and not only from user space
> where your workaround would apply.

Is there anything preventing such a HW event doing the equivalent of the
above?
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs