Resuming from a crashdump

[Christian Laursen]

Dominic Marks <dom at helenmarks.co.uk> writes:

> Christian Laursen wrote:
> > I was thinking about software suspend and got this crazy idea.
> > I have no idea if this is possible or total madness but here
> > goes anyway.
> > The idea would be to force the system to "crash" and make a
> > dump on a dedicated partition. On boot after initializing devices
> > but before mounting /, the kernel would check that partition and
> > if it found a dump there restore it to the machine's memory,
> > reinitialize devices and continue where it left off.
> 
> As I understand it, you choose to panic at a point where you
> have reached an unrecoverable state. So unless you had special
> code to fix this (thats going to be an interesting challenge as
> a programmer) you'd end up looping through the panic again and
> again.

I'm not interested in resuming after a real crash. The idea is
to get suspend/resume functionality without hardware support.

So there would be no panic, but the system would be brought to
a halt and the memory dumped.

> Also the devices wouldn't be in the state they had been in at
> the time of the panic, so if you could get as far as the
> reloaded kernel actualy doing anything, you'd either crash again
> or risk corrupting things horribly.

That's why they would have to be reinitialized.

-- 
Christian Laursen