Re: What to do?

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Monday 24 August 2009, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> Hi.

Hi,

> Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > On Sunday 23 August 2009, Jiri Slaby wrote:
> >> On 08/20/2009 06:22 AM, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> >>> I'd therefore like to ask whether there's anyone out there who could do
> >>> one or more of:
> >>>
> >>> 1) Step up to the plate and help improve swsusp, without relying on any
> >>> help from me but with my blessing if they choose to copy wholesale bits
> >>> of TuxOnIce;
> >> Hi, I think I can help here.
> > 
> > Great, thanks!
> 
> Yes, thanks for volunteering, Jiri!
> 
> We should start by asking where you're at as far as knowledge of swsusp
> and TuxOnIce goes. I know you've been around the TuxOnIce lists a bit,
> but don't know how much you know about C programming or the inards of
> the kernel, swsusp or TuxOnIce (ie how much help do you need to get up
> to speed?).
> 
> >> Is there any TODO or similar resources?
> > 
> > Not that I know of, but I think we should start with the non-controversial
> > things, like image compression etc.
> 
> No, I have a bit of a mental to-do list, but haven't written anything
> down yet. Here's a quick, high-level list (some of these things are big):
> 
> - Rework swap allocation (as per below) and freeing.
> - Rework i/o to use bmapping and lay the foundations for use multiple
> block devices.
> - Add modular design (will simplify the following additions)
> - Add multithreaded I/O
> - Add compression support
> - Add support for multiple swap devices
> - Add support for generic files (file allocator)
> - Do storage allocation etc ('image preparation') prior to the atomic
> copy instead of afterwards, making the only remaining variable how much
> ram drivers' pm routines need (and that might not be an issue by then).
> - Add userspace helper support (storage manager/userui).
> 
> I'd really like to start with adding the modular design - it will make
> things a lot cleaner, but I think we need to do some disentanglement
> first (TuxOnIce has all the support for compression in one file that
> simply isn't compiled if we don't want compression support. It would be
> good to get swsusp set up like that). This is why I have above the
> initial thought of handling doing the swap & compression stuff first.
> 
> When I prepared those compression patches earlier, it became apparent
> that we really need to begin with reworking how the swap is allocated,
> remembered and stored in the image header.
> 
> The current swsusp scheme of having a page of swap addresses preceding
> the pages that are written doesn't work well for compression, because
> when rereading the image, you can only do readahead in batches of that
> size. Everything will have to grind to a halt while we wait for the next
> 'index' page.
> 
> In TuxOnIce, we allocate all of the swap at the start of preparing to
> hibernate, which has other advantages I won't go into now. The pages
> allocated are stored as extents in memory. For doing the actual I/O, we
> bmap the swap that's allocated right after allocating it, storing the
> sector numbers in extents as well (remembering the block sizes that are
> relevant as well). We then use them directly in writing the image,
> storing major and minor numbers, block sizes and the extents in the
> image header for use at resume time.
> 
> I'd suggest that the place to begin would be converting swsusp to use
> this sort of scheme.
> 
> Regarding the non-controversial vs controversial thing, let's not worry
> about that. We should do things in the order that's logical, sensible
> and lays the foundation for the improvements we're planning to have
> follow. If an improvement is really an improvement, it shouldn't be a
> big problem to show that it has technical merits that make it
> worthwhile. As always in Linux, if someone wants to nak something
> without good reason, they'll just end up getting themselves ignored.

Well, if you start from something that people don't like, it may be difficult
to push the rest.

Still, I think Jiri is more than capable of handling that, so more or less
everything that is a clear improvement and doesn't introduce regressions of any
kind will probably work for me.

Thanks,
Rafael
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