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I got hibernation working on my PopOS machine a while ago, but it took a lot of steps. The problem is that it requires a LOT of swap space. That machine has 32GB of RAM—and that means I have to have a dedicated swap partition at least that large to make it work.

Honestly, it would probably be easier to just run everything off a VM if having persistent states matters to you.

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Does it need a dedicated partition or can it be created with a loopback file on disk?

A swapfile can be used in place of a swap partition.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap#Swap_file

At the cost of being practically forced to write your own initramfs, since few of the distro ones actually support this. Surprisingly how few projects use uswsusp anymore...

Wake up from hibernation kicks in early in the boot process, before file systems are resumed. You must have a partition for that.

I think it is possible https://wiki.debian.org/Hibernation/Hibernate_Without_Swap_P...

The default kernel resume implementation will look for a hibernate header in the visible swap partitions on boot.

If you boot into an initramfs and make additional swap partitions visible, eg via losetup, you can then write the device major:minor into /sys/power/resume and kaboom the kernel will freeze userspace, read the hibernation image out of there, then jump to it.

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