safe resuming: automatically invalidating an outdated hibernate snapshot

From: Martin Steigerwald
Date: Mon Oct 13 2008 - 06:18:22 EST


Cc to linux-kernel: This is mainly for tuxonice, but it might also be relevant
for other hibernate implementations. Maybe some general mechanism for
checking whether an on disk snapshot of the system is current would be good -
as also the resume parameter could be missing or wrong or whatnot.


Hi!

Is there a way to automatically invalidate the tuxonice snapshot when a non
tuxonice kernel is booted accidentally? I.e. could tuxonice recognize when
the swap partition has been accessed *after* the snapshot has been written?

It happened here several times that someone booted the wrong kernel and then
someone else booted the right one again. TuxOnIce would then resume from a
snapshot that it not up-to-date anymore. This leads to filesystem breakage as
the filesystem slab objects and other in memory structures would not
represent the current state of the filesystem on disk. xfs_repair did a
marvellous job on these occassions and I already changed menu.lst to hide the
GRUB boot menu by default, but it would be better if this case of
maloperation can be intercepted.

Ciao,
--
Martin Steigerwald - team(ix) GmbH - http://www.teamix.de
gpg: 19E3 8D42 896F D004 08AC A0CA 1E10 C593 0399 AE90

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