Amazon EC2 has the ability to run "EBS boot AMIs" which keep a persistent root disk[1]. This lets a user shutdown (stop) and boot (start) a server without losing the contents of the root disk.
There have been a number of people inquiring about the possibility of enhancing the Ubuntu on EC2 image so that during the stop/start cycle they can hibernate/resume as an alternative to shutdown/boot. I see there was some interest a while ago in getting hibernate to work with Eucalyptus[2]. What steps would need to be taken to propose hibernate support be investigated for EC2, perhaps in the upcoming "M" cycle since it might be too late for Lucid? Technical notes: Since hibernation cannot be done to the EC2 swap partition (not persistent) and (I think) hibernation cannot be done to a swap file on an active file system, this probably means that an additional EBS volume will need to be attached for swap (not difficult) or the main EBS volume will need to be split into multiple partitions for root and swap. [1]http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/12/03/amazon-ec2-instances-now-can-boot-from-amazon-ebs/ [2]https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerKarmicCloudPowerManagement -- Eric Hammond -- ubuntu-server mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
