After corrupting my gentoo root filesystem system during hibernate
experiments, I have finally finished the reinstallation. But hibernate
still doesn't seem to work correctly. The symptoms are the same as
during the experiments leading to the root fs corruption, but this time
the root seems to remain intact.
Here is what happened during the first experiment. I had an 8G swap
partition as /dev/sda5 and a data partition as /dev/sda6. Thinking that
pm-hibernate requires a dedicated, separate partition, I backed up
/dev/sda6, turned off swap at /dev/sda5, deleted /dev/sda[56] and then
created /dev/sda5 (8G), /dev/sda6 (8G) and /dev/sda7 (remaining size)
Then I specified /dev/sda6 as the resume partition on the kernel command
line.
But when I did the pm-hibernate, the system powered off, and after
reboot, the system seemed to have restored itself to the state it was at
when I ran pm-hibernate. So it "seemed" to have worked, but the system
was strangely unstable. There were many filesystem errors in the root
partition and when I did a ps ax, I saw hundreds of kworker kernel
threads lingering around. It was as if the hibernate image was slightly
corrupted, but not enough to cause a complete lockup, but enough to
cause there strange symptoms.
I first thought this was related to using the swap partition as the
resume destination. But after reinstalling gentoo, I again used a
separate partition for hibernate, but I am still seeing the same
symtoms. Many kworker kernel threads are sleeping. But this time, the
root filesystem didn't have any error. Concerned that a filesystem
corruption is imminent, I immediately turned off power.
So, what could be causing these strange problems? Based on what I have
read so far, the resume partition needs to be an active swap partition.
This seems rather strange, because linux is using the swap partition for
memory management as well. So shouldn't these be well separated to
prevent corrupting each other?
Hope someone can help me make sense of all of this...
--
Timur
