Arch Linux

archlynovice

Member

Registered: 2023-10-22

Posts: 28

Reliability of hibernation (suspend to disk) ?

Hi,

i think I have a solid encryption setup on my device. To make my day to day usage more easy, I want to implement hibernation (suspend to disk). But the frequency of this topic in the forums and conservative wording in the wiki entry make me question how reliable this (currently) is. I am willing to tinker, but I need a certain safety that my system will resume when I take my laptop somewhere else. Can someone tell me what I may have to expect when using this frequently? Can I rely on it?

I have full disk encryption (LVM on LUKS) with detatched header and /boot on USB. I use UEFI and systemd - so it should kind of work out of the box.

But I tick some boxes in the #Troubleshooting section of said wiki article.

• kms enabled in kernel parameters

• Nvidea dGPU (nouveau driver included for early KMS)

• I get some watchdog errors when I poweroff.

• My system has to rely on my USB stick to work after hibernation

I am aware that this is a rather open question. It also doesn't help that I haven't tried it yet. But gernerally speaking, I'm under the impression that this feature is notoriously hard to get right and thus an constant hustle. To cite a linked article from the wiki:

Linux STI/STR/HTD are system-level low power states that need hardware, firmware, Linux PM core, and many other kernel components, especially device drivers, to co-work well. This means that a single error in any single component might break system suspend/hibernate.

Maybe someone has a thought/experience about all this and can give some advice or take away my concerns/fear.

Cheers!

Last edited by archlynovice (Yesterday 17:38:03)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 58,964

Re: Reliability of hibernation (suspend to disk) ?

Does suspend to ram work?
Your biggests concern might be that /boot is on an external drive, but that's BIOS/UEFI specific and the only way to figure is to try.
If you run into trouble, ask and in the end it either works or doesn't.
If it works, that's reliable - until a kernel update breaks it or your disk bails out

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