On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 9:32 AM, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa <ancor@suse.de> wrote:
As you may know if you have followed previous blog posts by the YaST team, we are currently redesigning the YaST code for managing and proposing partitioning.
While designing the algorithm that proposes the disk layout for a new installation we came to a philosophical question - should we try to reuse existing swap partitions or should we always create our own?
I suggest you keep doing what you've been doing, the path of lease resistance, until there are resources to do this correctly. And to do it correctly means getting distros together and agreeing on scope and details of a bootloader specification or standard. So far there's an insufficient concensus; and GRUB upstream is opposed to the specs as written so far. So until the bootloader upstreams will take multiboot Linux seriously, you pretty much have to continue to give up on this pipe dream. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/MatthewGarrett/BootLoaderSpec/ Part of the problem of doing this correctly is that it should be encrypted by default.
If the current (i.e. old) installer finds a swap partition that is big enough for our needs, it will use it instead of creating a separate one. Although this can save some space, we are wondering if it's a good idea to do that by default. It effectively means that we will share the swap space with another Linux installation in the same computer. During normal operation that can be fine, but the swap partition is also used for suspend to disk (i.e. hibernate). That means that if we start LinuxA while LinuxB is hibernated, we will make impossible for LinuxB to resume the suspended execution.
Why is it even remotely easy to boot Linux A if Linux B is hibernated? The bootloader should be informed that Linux A will be resumed by default. The filesystem state of Linux B is questionable until resume happens so it's risky to boot Linux A while B is hibernated. How do you negotiate dual boot hibernation even with separate swaps without the two distros communicating system state unambiguously to the bootloader?
So, what the geckos out there think? Do you prefer to share swap partitions and save space or to have separate ones for better suspend isolation? Is there some implication or use-case that we have overlooked?
Support Intel Rapid Start, which uses its own partition type? I don't even really care about the dual boot scenario. I'd like my Linux only system to have parity with Windows and OS X when it comes to fast resumes from hibernation on modern hardware. The way this is done right now with Linux swap is so slow it's basically faster to just cold boot than do a resume from suspend to disk, that's how bad it is. Another nice thing about Intel Rapid Start is lid closure defaults to suspend to RAM, and only after power getting below a certain amount does the firmware wake up the system and switch to suspend to disk without having to involve the kernel. -- Chris Murphy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org