What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

[kwokyinc]

I can get a working environment much quicker by waking up from hibernation than from a new boot (I am using 9.10). So I found myself no longer shutting down the machine but instead just hit the hibernation botton whenever I am done using the computer.

From a user's point of view, is there any risk / problem associated with not shutting down the machine but just do hibernation?

[dibl]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

From a user's point of view, is there any risk / problem associated with not shutting down the machine but just do hibernation?

No big problems. Some little problems: (a) any zombies or hung processes get saved and come back when you resume, (b) wireless gets disconnected and must be manually reconnected.

[Qqmike]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

I confess that I never did know these definitions--hibernation, sleep, suspended whatever. I accept the default setting that comes with a Kubuntu installation. When I leave my machine untouched for "awhile," screen goes black, and to wake it up I touch something--the mouse or a key. I almost never shut the machine down, it runs 7x24 since 2005. It has been re-booted many times, of course. Now and then I'll intentionally shut it down completely, I guess just out of superstition, give it a rest and a fresh restart from scratch, maybe once or twice a month, maybe not. EDIT added: Oh, and I leave all my windows open, maybe Firefox, say three tabs, and OOo Writer document, and whatever else.

[kwokyinc]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

No big problems. Some little problems: (a) any zombies or hung processes get saved and come back when you resume, (b) wireless gets disconnected and must be manually reconnected.

Thanks dibl.

I don't use wireless connection at home. So it's not a problem for me.

And I seldom use alpha / testing stage software, so hopefully zombies program shouldn't be a real concern for me either.

[dibl]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

@Qqmike -- my perception is that those definitions have evolved over time, as power management technology has improved. We've come a long way since the invention of "screen savers".

@kwokyinc, once in awhile, you need to run updates and reboot -- I didn't mean to imply that you'll never need to boot your system again. Another thing to be aware of is that any hardware changes (like pulling out a USB stick or plugging in a printer) that happen while the system is hibernated may cause some "confusion" when you resume. Same situation as wireless -- the hibernated system does know about changes that happen while it is sleeping.

[Telengard]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

IMHO hibernation (suspend to disk) offers no advantage at all on Linux. The main advantage of hibernation is the ability to maintain your session even when the computer is powered down. That's nice, but KDE is smart enough to restore your session (reloading your applications) after being shut down. Worried about losing your data? Save more often!

Even on Windows it used to be pretty dicey whether it would wake up or not. I see no reason to bother with it on Linux.

If you have a notebook then you may find use for hibernation, but I always used sleep (suspend to RAM) on my notebook.

[dibl]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

S2RAM works great on my big desktop system, and that's what I normally use, because it stays plugged in all the time. With 3 hard drives and an overclocked X6800 CPU, I'm a little ashamed to leave it powered up when I'm not at home. But, for laptops and netbooks, S2RAM is going to continue to use battery power, although at a greatly reduced rate. The nice thing about S2Disk on a laptop or netbook is, there's zero battery drain during the time that it is hibernated. So you'll get more life out of a single battery charge with S2Disk than you will with S2RAM, although the difference may not be important for a lot of situations.

[The Liquidator]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

FWIW on my humble Dell inspiron 630m laptop I can hibernate it and upon resume I do get a WIFI connection after the desktop has been up for a few seconds. However, one quirk is that the Wifi LED (which after a normal boot doesn't light up) lights up on resume from hibernate and stays on even if I switch the Wifi off!

I do see a use for hibernation at the moment as currently when I boot the system it takes twice as long to get from KDM to a working desktop as it does to get to KDM from cold. There is a bug in kmserver I believe that won't be fixed until 4.4.

Suspend to Ram? For me it's forget it - I get the desktop back but nothing actually works at all (well I can move the mouse but it doesn't work beyond that) and I'm forced to do a hard shutdown. As always, YMMV

[sithlord48]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

the bigest disadvantage i have noticed is that it has never worked for me , and i just don't use it. i never really seen the point of it , kde has great session management. i have tried it on my laptop (in an effort to save batt life) but it never came back to life afterwards.

[kevinc]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

For users of encrypted partitions and anything that stores keys of various forms in memory, hibernation means copying all of them to disk where they become more accessible if your hard disk (with or without the rest of the computer) is stolen. Using LVM and only having the /boot partition NOT encrypted is one way of avoiding this. Having encrypted swap able to contain all of the RAM is good, but some use random key and not passphrase for this. Most secure way is to power off the machine and leave it turned off for the RAM to loose its contents, usually a few seconds is enough.

[sithlord48]

Re: What are the disadvantages of hibernation?

@kevinrc , thats a good point never thought of that. .