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Comment by bxparks | Hacker News Reader

I read somewhere that Linux hibernation requires swap (1-1.5X RAM?). So I have been configuring my laptops with a 1.5X swap partition. Unfortunately Linux hibernation has not worked for me since the early 2000's, across 10-15 different laptops. Apparently hibernation can use swapfiles, but I've never been able to verify that.

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From the kernel docs, `image-size` section, which relates to the hibernation image size.

> Reading from it returns the current image size limit, which is set to around 2/5 of the available RAM size by default.

I have successfully been hibernating a laptop after a few hours in suspend with swap allocated 50% the size of my RAM, so 8GB when I had a 16GB laptop, and 16GB now on a 32GB laptop. Never had any issues.

10+ years ago I also had problems getting hibernation to work. Then I read the Archlinux wiki on that topic and haven't had problems since.

It is working fine on Linux, you just have to set it up correctly.

If it’s seemingly as easy as reading a wiki and configuring a few things I’m curious why it doesn’t just work by default. Does it just not get enough dev love?

My personal experience is that the situation has improved somewhat but the hardware still plays a large part. A Kaby Lake laptop I had setup hibernation to encrypted swap (not file but partition iirc) worked well enough besides a few times when some peripherals e.g. wifi failed to power on after resuming from hibernation; A Zen3+ laptop from the same manufacturer that I got last week, running Arch (with the latest kernel and packages) _always_ had problem resuming, wifi (and who knows what else) never gets turned back on, the system sometimes enter into a weird state showing just a blank screen, not accepting any keypresses, or otherwise get stuck in some stage in the boot process with no output so it's hard to debug. So far it's been a real crapshoot.

I use a swapfile, and hibernate frequently (after iirc 2h of suspend, so sometimes multiple times a day). Does take a bit of setup (by far the most supportive of people arguing against Linux in favour of macOS/Windows thing I've done) but works well now it is.

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