Re: [PATCH v4] mm: Enable suspend-only swap spaces

[Evan Green <evgreen@chromium.org>]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 2:18 PM Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 27 Jul 2021 09:31:33 -0700 Evan Green <evgreen@chromium.org> wrote:
>
> > > Pavel just mentioned uswsusp, and I wonder if it would be a possible
> > > alternative to this patch.
> >
> > I think you're right that it would be possible to isolate the
> > hibernate image with uswsusp if you avoid using the SNAPSHOT_*SWAP*
> > ioctls. But I'd expect performance to suffer noticeably, since now
> > every page is making a round trip out to usermode and back. I'd still
> > very much use the HIBERNATE_ONLY flag if it were accepted, I think
> > there's value to it.
>
> The uswsusp option makes your patch a performance optimization rather
> than a feature-add.  And we do like to see quantitative testing results
> when considering a performance optimization.  Especially when the
> performance optimization is a bit icky, putting special-case testing
> all over the place, maintenance cost, additional testing effort, etc.
>
> I do think that diligence demands that we quantify the difference.  Is
> this a thing you can help with?

I'm wrong about the performance. Uswsusp is just as fast, and possibly
faster in my use case than kernel-driven hibernate. What's more,
uswsusp also helps me solve several additional problems I hadn't
tackled yet that were looming in front of me. Thanks all for your
patience and thoughtful review on this.

Patch withdrawn.
-Evan