Re: Which is simpler? (Was Re: [Suspend2-devel] Re: [ 00/10] [Suspend2] Modules support.)

[Nigel Cunningham <nigel@suspend2.net>]

Hi Jim.

On Tuesday 07 February 2006 13:01, Jim Crilly wrote:
> On 02/06/06 08:19:02PM -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 19:59 -0500, Jim Crilly wrote:
> > > I guess reasonable is a subjective term. For instance, I've seen
> > > quite a few people vehemently against adding new ioctls to the
> > > kernel and yet you'll be adding quite a few for /dev/snapshot. I'm
> > > just of the same mind as Nigel in that it makes the most sense to me
> > > that the majority of the suspend/hibernation process to be in the
> > > kernel.
> >
> > No one is saying that ANY new ioctls are bad, just that the KISS
> > principle of engineering dictates that it's bad design to use ioctls
> > where a simple read/write to a sysfs file will do.
>
> I understand that, but shouldn't the KISS principle also be applied to
> the user interface of a feature? As it stands it looks like Suspend2
> is going to be a lot simpler for users to configure and get right than
> uswsusp. As long as you have Suspend2 enabled in the kernel it 'just
> works', even if you don't have the userland UI it'll still suspend and
> resume just without the progress bars. There is still some room for
> error with things like forgetting to enable the swap writer and then
> attempting to suspend to a swap device or making lzf a module and
> forgetting to load it before resuming from a compressed image, but those
> are no worse than any other kernel option.
>
> With uswsusp it'll be more flexible in that you'll be able to use any
> userland process or library to transform the image before storing it,
> but the suspend and resume processes are going to be a lot more
> complicated. For instance, how are you going to tell the kernel that you
> need the uswsusp UI binary, /bin/gzip and /usr/bin/gpg to run after the
> rest of userland has been frozen?

As I understand it, with uswsusp, all the functionality will be compiled 
into one monolithic binary, which you'll also need to put in your initrd 
or initramfs.

Hope that helps.

Nigel

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