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Date:      Tue, 09 Jul 2002 19:28:16 -0700
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>
Cc:        Dmitry Morozovsky <marck@rinet.ru>, Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se>, Chuck Robey <chuckr@chuckr.org>, FreeBSD Hackers List <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: swap & huge mem systems
Message-ID:  <3D2B9BC0.7A8A45@mindspring.com>
References:  <20020709161044.C77578-100000@woozle.rinet.ru> <3D2B6A45.86B061E7@mindspring.com> <20020710001249.GB541@HAL9000.wox.org>

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David Schultz wrote:
> Thus spake Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>:
> > You don't have to dump on your swap.  It's just convenient to do.
> > You can actually dump on any raw partition which is large enough.
> >
> > If FreeBSD intrinsically handled "suspend to disk", then you would
> > need something seperate from swap, anyway.
> 
> But in the "suspend to disk" case, you can assume you have a
> non-braindead kernel.  Couldn't you just allocate the blocks
> in the filesystem and write your image?  Sure, it would be a
> bit slower than using a dedicated partition, but nobody said
> "suspend to disk" is a good idea anyway.

No, because in order to resume, you'd need to be running, and
if you were running, then you couldn't resume anything that
conflicted with the default boot state (e.g. keenel modules
that were loaded post-boot).

Suspend-to-disk resumption also requires that any state that you
had outstanding at the time of the suspend is resumed afterward;
this generally includes network state, since sockets don't get a
"keepalive" unless you ask for it, and they generally stay "open"
indefinitely, except for servers that have explicit idle timeouts
(in which case, the client must expect to reestablish the connection,
and you are still OK).  The only place this really fails is "modern"
UNIX kernels that attempt to treat TIME_WAIT incorrectly by setting
a timer, in violation of the protocol specification.

OH... and FWIW, the absolutely *best* way to install a new system
is to "resume from disk" from a distribution image; you are
basically running in about 6 seconds.

-- Terry

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