Re: [OT] speeding boot process (was Re: [ANNOUNCE] hotplug-ng 001 release)

[Nigel Cunningham <ncunningham@cyclades.com>]

Hi.

On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 17:15, Jim Crilly wrote:
> Nigel Cunningham said the following:
> > You warmed my heart until...
> 
> Good to know someone reads my email =)
> 
> > Why not? :> I guess you mean to the problem of slow booting in the first
> > place - I would agree with you there, but is there are reason why we
> > should have booting being the norm instead of normally suspending and
> > resuming, and only rebooting for new kernels/hardware/etc.
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I would go nuts without swsusp2 on my notebook and I don't 
> see why that shouldn't be a valid avenue to pursue; even for servers it doesn't 
> seem like a terribly bad idea. But for me it only works on 1 out of my 4 
> machines. The 3 non-working machines have their root and swap on SCSI devices 
> and to top it off 2 of them are non-x86 architectures.

Okay. So it's a lack of hardware support then. I need to bug people to
get SCSI PM support working, and to lend me non-x86 and x86-64 some more
:>

> Another issue would be dual-booting, which a lot of people still do for some 
> strange reason. At least I had noticed that Windows tends to have problems when 
> filesystems it had mounted before the hibernation are altered while it's not 
> running. I'm not sure if similar issues would apply to Linux, hell I'm not even 
> sure if it still applies to Windows because that was so long ago that I had 
> noticed.

Suspend certainly doesn't like filesystems being mounted under it - it
writes the image without remounting ro or unmounting. I think I saw a
patch Tim had that remounted ro, but you still have to be careful as the
saved memory contains a picture of the state of superblocks and so on.

Regards,

Nigel

-- 
Nigel Cunningham
Software Engineer, Canberra, Australia
http://www.cyclades.com

Ph: +61 (2) 6292 8028      Mob: +61 (417) 100 574