[conspire] Linux laptop vendors

[Nick Moffitt]

Don Marti:
> > Maybe hardware support has improved quite a bit since I last did a
> > laptop installation.  Did hibernate work "out-of-the-box" on the
> > Ubuntu installation?  
> 
> Haven't tried it -- I've only done suspend to RAM.

Ubuntu now suspends to disk on just about anything.  It doesn't need
much in the way of hardware support.  Basically (if you wave your hands
around *quite* a lot) it works like this:

	1) Throw away your vm cache entirely
	2) page *everything* out to swap
	3) put a special flag on the volume
	4) power off

Now when the kernel starts next and it has that special flag, it knows
to page in everything, and I mean *everything* from the swap partition.

There's bound to be some blocks to handle state that isn't in main
memory, and it might not work if you're using some kooky proprietary
video driver written by hardware engineers that should never be allowed
to touch OS kernels.  But by and large it works on pretty much all
desktops and laptops and any system that has a swap partition.

So when your OS does hibernate in software, why do you need to ever
bother with hardware-driven hibernate again?

-- 
"As I soared high into the tag cloud Xeni Jardin             Nick Moffitt
carefully put up for me, I couldn't help but wonder how     nick at zork.net
high we were above the blogosphere." -- Carlos Laviola