[gentoo-user] Suspend to swap on a diskless host

[Dan Farrell]

I know this is a long shot, and not many people run diskless hosts.  I
have one with kind of a loud fan that uses a lot of energy - it's a
pentium 4 in a slimline case and it runs pretty hot, so I can't adjust
the fan speed based on temperature, because it seems like turning the
fan off at 70+ degrees C is a bad idea.  

Instead, I'd like to be able to suspend to ram or swap so that the
fans can stop spinning and the cpu can cool down -- all in one fell
swoop!  -- but I've had troubles doing so.  While working on that, I
was thinking I might have better luck if the kernel was allowed to
restart itself.  I would like to set up swsuspend on the machine, but
I'm a little unclear as to how I would do so.  

I know swapon doesn't work on regular files, so to add my swap I need
to first use losetup to set up /dev/loop0 as my swap device.  Then
swapon /dev/loop0 works.  but how can I enable swap on loop0 before the
initscripts boot (right now I have it done in local.start).  Don't I
need to be able to mount the swap as swap right away to resume from
it?  Or will it be enought to specify the location?  If not, is there
some way to specify loop settings at boot time, on the kernel command
line?  

		Thanks for any help you might be able to provide,
						
						Dan Farrell

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