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Is btrfs stable with hibernate now? The last couple of times I used it, it crashed on me.

I had a couple problems requiring a btrfsck, specifically related to google-chrome cache directories. Never had it since. I use btrfs snapshotting a lot (for convenient system rollback).

I definitely am not running btrfs on a production machine, but I love it on this laptop. Wouldn't call it stable yet.

edit to note that I don't hibernate, just sleep.

I don't know you'd ever use hibernate anymore. I can cold boot to desktop faster than it takes to read 16GB of ram contents off a mechanical drive.

Speed isn't the only consideration. If you're using disk encryption, the only way to remove keys from RAM is to power off or hibernate. Preserving state between sessions with hibernation is much more convenient. Also, Linux only uses RAM * 2/5 as the size of the hibernation image [1]. You can make this even smaller by changing /sys/power/image_size. So with 16GB of RAM, it only has to write/read about 6.4GB.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/interface.txt

If you use hibernate won't the keys be stored on the swap partition?

You can use LVM to make the swap partition inside the encrypted container. If you don't want to use LVM, you can just use a swap file on an encrypted partition (but this isn't supported with btrfs).

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