[gentoo-user] Weird hibernate problem

[Timur Aydin]

After corrupting my gentoo root filesystem system during hibernate 
experiments, I have finally finished the reinstallation. But hibernate 
still doesn't seem to work correctly. The symptoms are the same as 
during the experiments leading to the root fs corruption, but this time 
the root seems to remain intact.

Here is what happened during the first experiment. I had an 8G swap 
partition as /dev/sda5 and a data partition as /dev/sda6. Thinking that 
pm-hibernate requires a dedicated, separate partition, I backed up 
/dev/sda6, turned off swap at /dev/sda5, deleted /dev/sda[56] and then 
created /dev/sda5 (8G), /dev/sda6 (8G) and /dev/sda7 (remaining size) 
Then I specified /dev/sda6 as the resume partition on the kernel command 
line.

But when I did the pm-hibernate, the system powered off, and after 
reboot, the system seemed to have restored itself to the state it was at 
when I ran pm-hibernate. So it "seemed" to have worked, but the system 
was strangely unstable. There were many filesystem errors in the root 
partition and when I did a ps ax, I saw hundreds of kworker kernel 
threads lingering around. It was as if the hibernate image was slightly 
corrupted, but not enough to cause a complete lockup, but enough to 
cause there strange symptoms.

I first thought this was related to using the swap partition as the 
resume destination. But after reinstalling gentoo, I again used a 
separate partition for hibernate, but I am still seeing the same 
symtoms. Many kworker kernel threads are sleeping. But this time, the 
root filesystem didn't have any error. Concerned that a filesystem 
corruption is imminent, I immediately turned off power.

So, what could be causing these strange problems? Based on what I have 
read so far, the resume partition needs to be an active swap partition. 
This seems rather strange, because linux is using the swap partition for 
memory management as well. So shouldn't these be well separated to 
prevent corrupting each other?

Hope someone can help me make sense of all of this...

-- 
Timur