Re: Power Management with rootfs on SDMMC.

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Sat Jan 03 2009 - 15:11:17 EST


Hi!

> > I am using linux-2.6.27. I am testing power management after
> > booting out of a SD/MMC card.
> > My root file system is on a SD card.
> >
> > I am issuing the following command to suspend
> >
> > $ echo -n mem > /sys/power/state
> > What happens is, The kernel hangs and it does not come out of suspend.
> > even after i press keypad/generate serial input data.
>
>
> > Has anyone tried this before?
> >
> > Am i missing something here?
>
> I don't think you're missing much, and you're definitely not alone.
>
> There have been long threads on mobile phone and netbook related forums about issues
> with seemingly "any slightly advanced use whatsoever" of partitions on SD cards.
>
> IMHO in this strongly increasingly netbook- and mobile phone-enabled world it's
> a bloody shame that:
...
> - installing a swap partition on an SD card and then resuming can easily
> go as far as __even completely corrupting__ the entire SD card partitioning
> plus first partition (corrupts first 1kB of the card: both table and partition)
> People then immediately resort to a non-helpful "Don't Do This, Ever" reply
> (using swap partition on SD and suspend, see http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6532#comment:10),
> but to this I'd say:
> News Flash, if this can theoretically be made to work at all using software
> (i.e. there are no VM-related _hard_ blockers to such an operation
> of using swap itself on a non-fixed SD slot), then this should goddamn be made
> to work practically on Linux, _somehow_, since on SSD netbooks this is
> the most natural thing to do to avoid wear of the builtin device.

I'd like to help with this one... can you reproduce this?


> (or, slightly reworded: I think it's high time for some kernel God to buy a measly
> netbook or some such instead of 16-core mainframes to get a feeling for the
> amount of issues that one hits there)

I have one and yes, its full of problems; see my blog post about 'evil
little cards'.

OTOH currently you can't safely use ext3 on flash card, so suspend
problems seem little 'uninteresting' compared to that.
Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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