Resuming from a crashdump

[art yerkes]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:45:43 +0000
Steven Smith <sos22 at cantab.net> wrote:

> If you just send pages to disk rather than to another machine on the
> network, then you should be able to suspend-to-disk an entire
> operating system with minimal user-perceived downtime.  One
> possibility here would be to e.g. live suspend the machine every five
> minutes or so, and guarantee the user never loses more than five
> minutes of work.

You're assuming that the filesystem doesn't change in the 5 minutes.
Loading a dirty kernel state about a filesystem that changed later is
asking for trouble.  

Also, the kernel doesn't know the whole story about the display state,
because X does its own acceleration, and manages the font cache by itself.
Some hardware registers are write only (VGA palette registers), which
means that the application or driver which set them needs to assist in
remembering how to put them back together.
-- 
Here's a simple experiment. Stand on a train track between two locomotives
which are pushing on you with equal force in opposite directions. You will
exhibit no net motion. None the less, you may soon begin to notice that
something important is happening.
-- Robert Stirniman