On Wednesday, 25 April 2007 22:44, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Wed, 25 Apr 2007, Pavel Machek wrote:
> >
> > Can I get you on IRC somewhere? No, I do not think I'm a moron, and
> > yes, I need to suspend^Wsnapshot the devices before, so I have that in
> > the snapshot. Of course, I'll need to resume^Wrestore the devices
> > before writing snapshot. That's okay, it does not take long.
>
> You do NOT need to "suspend" the devices, and that's the whole point.
>
> You may want to save the device info somewhere, BUT THAT IS SOMETHING
> TOTALLY DIFFERENT!
>
> This is *exactly* the confusion I'm talking about. The STD and STR
> codepaths try to use the same function for two TOTALLY DIFFERENT things.
>
> STR actually wants to "suspend".
>
> STD actually wants to "atomic snapshot", and it must not allow allocations
> or anything like that, because the whole snapshot image should be done
> atomically as one event. But it should *not* suspend, because that device
> may actually be needed afterwards.
>
> So not the same thing at all.
>
> So here's what "suspend()" wants:
> - suspend() - preparatory work, can error our, can delay, can park the
> disk, etc etc.
> - suspend_late() - called late, with interrupts disabled, should actually
> suspend if the early suspend didn't do it already
>
> And here is what "snapshot()" wants:
> - prepare_to_snapshot() (for memory allocation)
> - snapshot() - called late, with interrupts disabled, save state.
>
> and there is absolutely _zero_ overlap between them. There just isn't
> anything in common. Yes, both are two-phase (for the simple reason that
> both want an "atomic" part), but there's really no real overlap.
>
> Just trying to *make* them be the same operations is just going to
> introduce flags that then cause them to be totally different *and*
> confusing and generate bugs. It also means that people do one of them, and
> "it works" for that case, and the other case is totally broken, but it's
> not obvious, because doing one means that the system _thinks_ that you did
> both!
>
> In the very unlikely case that some driver actually *wants* to use the
> same function for snapshots and suspending, that driver could just go
> ahead and _use_ the same function pointer. But now, as things are set up,
> we force a total confusion on drivers by calling them through the same
> interface for two totally different things.
I agree, except there are surprisingly many drivers like that.
You're right, we should be doing all of it in a different way, but this means
a lot of changes and we can't do them overnight.
As I wrote in the reply to Pavel, I think we can introduce .freeze(), .thaw()
(and .prethaw() for that matter) callbacks for hibernation and make drivers
use them, but that will be a long series of patches. Still, I think it's
doable.
Greetings,
Rafael
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