On 04/20/10 10:37, Ian-Xue Li wrote:
I've been using pm-suspend for temporarily shutting down the computer for later use, but now I raised the question whether it is safe or stable to do so at a constant basis. That is, seldom real reboots and often just suspend.
me too, sometimes
As you know that suspend don't really unmount the drives to read-only before it goes into suspension, when resumption had failed, you usually need to repair it and check for errors. This is at least the case for me when I use ext4.
It's no worse than power failure, or system crash where you kill it with the power button! Actually I think it's better, because Linux does sync filesystems before suspending, so at least you won't have loss of recent data. Besides, I get more crashes when it's running normally than when it's suspended.
However, restarting frequently tends to increase stability. It makes you restart your applications such as Firefox (which definitely benefits from a restart now and then). If you've upgraded (-Syu), it makes sure the running version of everything is the current version, including system libs. If there was corrupted memory due either to a bug or a hardware glitch, it cleans that up. Suspend/resume doesn't do any of these -- but then, leaving your computer on constantly is at least as bad as suspend/resume, probably worse.
On the other hand, sometimes suspend is broken for some hardware. You should be able to observe this pretty easily for yourself. If, on the other hand, it looks like it's working, and if the system post-resume seems to be working just as well as the system pre-resume, then you should feel comfortable using it. After all, it's a great convenience!
(modulo security considerations, if you keep an encrypted disk and don't want people who get their hands on your computer to be able to read your data! Or just login-password-wise if you're dealing with tech-ignorant friends.)
-Isaac
