Suspend2 Suspended

musicon writes "Nigel Cunningham, the creator of the Suspend2 software suspend system for Linux announced his retirement from the project in a message to the Linux Kenel Mailing List. 'Users of Suspend2 can rest assured that I will not allow the patches to suffer bitrot. I will be continuing to use them myself, and will therefore have the best of incentives to keep them up-to-date [...] I won't, however, be making any sort of concerted effort at getting them merged into the vanilla kernel [...] I don't see the point to doing anything but maintaining the patches as they stand.'"

Comments

for the lazy....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi all.

I'm delighted to announce that I've accepted a call to serve a congregation in
Victoria, Australia, as a Home Missionary elder. As a result, some time in
the next month or two, I will stop working for Cyclades and make the move.

Users of Suspend2 can rest assured that I will not allow the patches to suffer
bitrot. I will be continuing to use them myself, and will therefore have the
best of incentives to keep them up-to-date.

Now for the downside: I won't, however, be making any sort of concerted effort
at getting them merged into the vanilla kernel after my move, and am not
inclined to make a big effort beforehand. Recent discussions on LKML clearly
showed that Pavel doesn't want to see them merged, and I didn't see much in
the way of other kernel developers expressing a desire contrary to Pavel's
wishes. I don't want to waste my time and effort, so I don't see the point to
doing anything but maintaining the patches as they stand.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Cyclades for their employment and
support of the project.

Regards,

Nigel

Home Missionary elder?

[MichaelSmith]

According to TFA he is going to be some sort of Home Missionary elder. He seems to be about 200 years too late. All the missionaries left years ago. At least I thought so...hope so.

Now I don't want to be rude but what we really do need here in Victoria, Australia is good software engineers and I can think right now of a spot for him a couple of cubes across from me where his knowledge of linux kernel internals could be put to good use.

Re:Home Missionary elder?

[smvp6459]

I think he's talking LDS AKA Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints AKA Mormon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Jesus_Chris t_of_Latter-day_Saints )

They're about the only people I know that use the words home, missionary, and elder in the same sentence. I currently reside in Salt Lake City, Utah, or as I like to call it, the mothership of the LDS church; as such I get to witness this "culture". It's unlikely these missionaries will ever leave Australia unless A. Your goverment passes laws prohibiting their presence (China) or B. Numbers of them start getting killed (certain parts of the U.S.). And something tells me the First Presidency would disagree with your religion vs. technology assesment.

Re:Home Missionary elder?

[swillden]

I think he's talking LDS AKA Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints AKA Mormon. They're about the only people I know that use the words home, missionary, and elder in the same sentence.

I'm Mormon, and was a missionary, and the LDS Church has no such thing as "Home Missionary elder". We have full-time missionaries, both young (ages 19-25 or so) and old (retired couples), and Home Teachers, who visit members of the Church in their own areas, and various Ward Missionaries and Stake Missionaries, who also only work in their own home areas, and do it as a part time thing (usually no more than a couple of hours per week).

So (unfortunately :-) ), I don't think Nigel is Mormon. I do respect and honor his decision to serve God in his own faith, though, and wish him well in his endeavors, even though I use and like Suspend2 and wish it were in Linus' tree.

And to all of the people complaining about Mormon missionaries "forcing" their beliefs upon people, missionaries do no such thing. Indeed, there's really no way they could force their ideas on people. Missionaries offer to talk to you, and to give you a Book of Mormon. If you don't want to talk to them, don't. Unlike the missionaries of some other faiths, Mormon missionaries are taught to be polite and respectful, not confrontational or combative. In my experience, 99% of the complaints about pushy Mormon missionaries are actually complaints about other churches' missionaries who are mistaken for Mormons. And even those missionaries can't "force" their ideas on anyone... they just use an approach which is more offensive (and, IME, far less successful as well).

Re:Home Missionary elder?

[LWATCDR]

Thanks for posting that. I was going to but you beat me too it. Yea I doubt it also but then there are a lot more Linux hackers out there that are Mormon than a most people on Slashdot know. After all Novell is out of Utah and BTU TV actually gives instructions on using Linux to view it's streams.
Funny how someone that lives in Salt Lake City and claims to know so much about the LDS church could get it so wrong.

What really BUGS the daylights out of me is why do people think they have the right to say he shouldn't do this! Read his post people!
"I'm delighted to announce that I've accepted a call to serve a congregation in Victoria, Australia, as a Home Missionary elder."
He obviously wants to do this! He is happy to do this why do some people think they have the right to say anything but best wishes? I mean for good freaking grief for all we know he will be working in a drug rehab program or a food kitchen! Bunch of selfish little brats are all worried that their free software will go away. Well you all have the code. Start working and stop whining because Nigel decided that there are other things HE wants to give HIS time too.

Tragedy

[d99-sbr]

This is something that the Linux kernel badly needs! Presently, suspend and hibernation is at least 5 years behind OS X and Windows.

It takes almost two minutes to hibernate my Thinkpad with 512 MB RAM when running Ubuntu, while Windows takes about 15 seconds. Additionally, it does crash every now and then.

Re:Tragedy

[myspys]

suspend and hibernation is at least 5 years behind OS X and Windows

I know hibernation exists in Windows, but OS X?

Can you please enlighten me, since I've totally missed this feature in OS X :-/

I hope you're not talking about Safe Sleep, which is only available in the newer Powerbooks and is not the same thing as hibernation (well, it works the same, but only works on the Powerbooks, where as hibernate works on any Windows PC)

Re:Tragedy

[brunes69]

Hibernate is suspend to disk.

In Windows there is little reason to use suspend to ram, because suspend to disk is so damn fast (10 seconds down, 15-20 seconds up), and while suspended the laptop uses *0* power.

Like the parent said - suspend to disk in Linux is not in a good state right now. When it *does* work, it does so very slowly. When it *doesn't* work, it's a disaster and sometimes leaves your system in such a weird state you need to hard reboot and fsck your drives.

And don't even think about using it if you use the NVidia drivers.

Re:Tragedy

[LWATCDR]

You have the source. Grab a copy and get to work. That is the point of the GPL. It is only tragic if you don't want it enough to work on it or pay someone to work on it.

What are the alternatives?

[Rytis]

Is this the only software that can force my Thinkpad R50e to fall asleep? Aren't there any others?
I've compiled 2.6.15.4 kernel and the latest version of Suspend2 is for the 2.6.15.1 version. And now I am not even sure whether the patch is coming in a next month or it isn't coming at all.
Gee, I have to turn it off all the time.

Distributions responsibility

[zaguar]

This is an area where the major distro's - Ubuntu, Mandrake, Suse et al. need to pick up their game. Suspend2 is a great solution, but it is poorly integrated into the vanilla distro's. A few months ago, I tried Suspend2 with Hoary (Ubuntu 5.04) I had to:

1. Download Ubuntu kernel sources
2. Apply a patch-set
3. Recompile the kernel and install the kernel
4. And some other stuff I forgot - involving messing around in /etc and other areas - config files galore!

Now I havent tried it with Breezy, but I am pretty sure there is no .deb/script on UbuntuForums.

Why can't the disto's simply give the user Suspend2 fully integrated in their repective kernels?

Surely not stability issues, because it was bug-free for me. Even a simple choice would be miles better than what the current situation. The distro makers have dropped the ball, let's see them pick it up.

Oh wait - I just said that Ubuntu et al. is not perfect! Goodbye, karma.

Re:Awww!!!

[gerddie]

There is a suspend as part of the vanilla kernel. I'm using it for quite some time now. Hibernate works on my Laptop, but only if I don't use the binary only nvidia drivers (Geforce2 Go) - and it works on my desktop system too - here even with the nvidia drivers (Geforce 6600) and SMP/Hyperthreading enabled (needs CPU hotplug enabled too). I'm using the hibernate scripts ( (apt-get install | emerge) hibernate) and the /sys/power/state method. Suspend to RAM is not working on my desktop system though.

I'm not resigning.

[nigelcunningham]

I guess I didn't write that email well enough - I tried to clearly say I'm not resigning, just switching full-time jobs, and as a result won't be working on Suspend as much. Given that it's already pretty mature, this won't have much effect on it's development, and I'll still be producing patches for vanilla kernels. Hope that helps. Nigel

Re:I'm not resigning.

[nigelcunningham]

I don't think we need a new maintainer, but if it comes to that, I'd happily work with them. I still have lots of tidying up and improving the documentation to do first though. No sense making it harder for others to use and understand than it needs to be. Regards, Nigel

Re:I'm not resigning.

[nigelcunningham]

Mostly because Pavel has the death grip on the vanilla kernel. I'm still working on doing everything necessary to get it merged, including preparing a git tree. I figure that even if it doesn't get merged, it will make it easier for me to maintain and for distros to take up if they want to. Who knows - maybe Andrew and Linus will eventually decide to pick it up regardless of Pavel's objections. But they won't be able to do that if I don't get it ready. HTH.

Misleading subject

[.tom.]

This post's subject is misleading:
- suspend2 project is not suspended
- Nigel Cunningam will keep working on it
- it's only inclusion in vanilla kernel (mainline) which is unclear

Trying to make puns in subjects is not always a good idead...

Re:Misleading subject

[nigelcunningham]

Hardware bug fixes aren't really my domain. Traditionally, I have included some so that suspend2 users don't have to go searching for extra patches, but they really belong upstream to start with so swsusp users can benefit too. New features... well, I think I've run out of things that need to be added. If you have a suggestion, I'd certainly consider it.

That's fine.

[Inoshiro]

The correct answer is that the kernel needs to do this, not userland (per suspend1), because of all the layers that need their information preserved. Having any kind of userland help doesn't work, because suddenly you've broken the "every process is equal" approach to the scheduler. But it's also not correct to throw in a huge, complicated interface (suspend2).

The correct answer is something like outlined here: " If you want my cheerfully uninformed opinion, we should toss both of them out and implement suspend3, which is based on the exec/kdump infrastructure. There's so much duplication of intent here that it's not funny."

You just have to reserve memory for a dump kernel. It's a much better trade off than making the scheduler stupid (suspend1), and keeps your kernel conceptually much simpler than a fancy kernel internal API (suspend2).

Re:That's fine.

[nigelcunningham]

I'm sorry, but saying that shows a lack of understanding of how complex using kexec would really be. It's designed for a completely different purpose, and mangling it to do suspend would be complicated to say the least, and require the user to set aside a considerable amount of memory that just isn't really necessary.