Linux: Hibernation With Kexec

Offering a potential alternative to the existing suspend and restore implementations in the Linux Kernel, Ying Huang posted a patch utilizing kexec, “kexec based hibernation has some potential advantages over uswsusp and suspend2. ” He listed two such potential advantages, “the hibernation image size can exceed half of memory size easily,” and, “the hibernation image can be written to and read from almost anywhere, such as a USB disk [or] NFS.” He described the feature implemented by his patch as “jumping from a kexeced kernel to the original kernel”, allowing someone to first boot from one kernel, then to kexec another crashdump kernel in reserved memory and run from it for a while, and finally to “jump back” to the original kernel.