boot times and software suspend (Was: Re: [plug] Distro Day !!!)

[Craig Ringer]

> Oh, there's a few things that won't work with swsusp at the moment -
> SCSI drives, SMP, and the occasional nvidia chipset/driver. (But
> seriously, who's laptops have SCSI or SMP? :)

Perhaps, but swsusp is not only for laptops. Suspend to disk is 
incredibly useful for desktops, and IMHO is the most convenient and 
useful form of suspending a machine out there (at least when the OS 
supports it well).

SMP support for swsusp will begin to matter soon (probably even on 
laptops) once the SMT (HyperThreading) Intel CPUs become more 
commonplace. These are, after all, virtual SMP machines. That said, I 
fear the answer will likely be "turn off SMT".

IMHO SCSI suspend/resume does also matter, since most RAID devices 
(including a number of ATA/SATA ones) appear to the OS as a SCSI 
interface. I don't know about you folk, but I'm tired of crappy 
unreliable disks (no I don't buy cheap ones, nor the highest capacity on 
the market - in fact I buy middle-high capacity "premium" ATA disks) and 
plan to include proper hardware SATA RAID in my next upgrade. The 
alternative, SCSI drives, is stupidly expensive and also won't work with 
swsusp. Then again, hopefully the SCSI + swsusp issue will be fixed by 2.6 .

Craig