[arch-general] stability from pm-suspend ?

[Isaac Dupree]

On 04/20/10 10:37, Ian-Xue Li wrote:
> I've been using pm-suspend for temporarily shutting down the computer
> for later use, but now I raised the question whether it is safe or
> stable to do so at a constant basis. That is, seldom real reboots and
> often just suspend.

me too, sometimes

> As you know that suspend don't really unmount the drives to read-only
> before it goes into suspension, when resumption had failed, you usually
> need to repair it and check for errors. This is at least the case for me
> when I use ext4.

It's no worse than power failure, or system crash where you kill it with 
the power button!  Actually I think it's better, because Linux does sync 
filesystems before suspending, so at least you won't have loss of recent 
data.  Besides, I get more crashes when it's running normally than when 
it's suspended.

However, restarting frequently tends to increase stability.  It makes 
you restart your applications such as Firefox (which definitely benefits 
from a restart now and then).  If you've upgraded (-Syu), it makes sure 
the running version of everything is the current version, including 
system libs.  If there was corrupted memory due either to a bug or a 
hardware glitch, it cleans that up.  Suspend/resume doesn't do any of 
these -- but then, leaving your computer on constantly is at least as 
bad as suspend/resume, probably worse.

On the other hand, sometimes suspend is broken for some hardware. You 
should be able to observe this pretty easily for yourself. If, on the 
other hand, it looks like it's working, and if the system post-resume 
seems to be working just as well as the system pre-resume, then you 
should feel comfortable using it. After all, it's a great convenience!

(modulo security considerations, if you keep an encrypted disk and don't 
want people who get their hands on your computer to be able to read your 
data!  Or just login-password-wise if you're dealing with tech-ignorant 
friends.)

-Isaac