John,
You can share a swap partition as long as you shut down
properly ( like telinit 6 or whatever ). I do it all the time.
The swap partition is recognized as a proper swap parttion by
the next kernel.
Swap Suspend on the other hand re-writes the swap partition so
booting another kernel will likely have dire consequences since
to it, the swap partition looks corrupted but it may or may not
recognize that. Also, your filesystem will be in a weird state
and it will have to be fsck'ed. You will probably have to boot
in rescue mode and have to run mkswap before things will work
again.
You can use the noresume option to turn off swap suspend altogether.
Booting the same kernel from a swap suspended system with the
noresume option lead to the same mess as above.
Look in the acpi-howto for more details. It has a good summary
of what suspend1, 2 and 3 does.
peter
----
Peter Skensved Email : peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dept. of Physics,
Queen's University,
Kingston, Ontario,
Canada
