The Case for Hibernation (Librem 5)

Librem Phones (Librem 5)
#1

I was looking at the MR draft for hibernation, and noticed that Martin was saying that a justification for this feature was missing. The purpose of this post is to provide that justification. Jets don’t fail me now…

At the heart of the L5 we see a traditional Linux desktop. In a very real sense the phone in your pocket is exactly the thing sitting on your desk. They are both computers. Purism has had a lot of success getting suspend to be rock solid on the L5. It was no easy task and the work isn’t really over just yet, I would imagine.

Battery life, however, is still a concern, if you are not able to charge. And because the phone in my pocket is a computer, I use it like a computer. I open things and leave them open so that I can continue working on them as time permits.

If I know that I will not be able to use my phone for a period of time, due to security regulations, etc. instead of leaving the phone suspended, where the battery continues to drain, but no calls or use is possible anyway, or off, meaning I need to re-setup my workspace again and get back into things, being able to hibernate would allow me to conserve power in this case.

Instead of having my battery drain for 8 hours doing nothing, my workflow/space is maintained, it could be not wasting power altogether. And when I retrieve my phone on a break, etc. I can easy just boot right back into my session.

This is the thinking. This line of thinking is in line with the convergence aspect of the phone. Yes it looks like a phone, but lets not limit it to acting like a phone.

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#2

I’d not see a very strong use case for hibernation, neither, like Martin. But I’d use hibernation regularly if it would work.

@2disbetter does exactly describe the situation I’d use hibernation for and in the long term I’d say it would be very disappointing if hibernation would end up as a won't fix.

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#3

It just needs someone to put some effort into debugging it. That someone can be anyone, but I don’t think it will be Purism (unless a strong business case to do so shows up). We already have enough on our plates :wink:

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#4

Some years ago I used to use hibernation a lot on my desktop - and I see the benefit. But then my distro made it more difficult to enable hibernation and it started to be unreliable anyway. So I stopped using it.

So the first question would be: do you actually use hibernation on your desktop / laptop?

I guess you would need to elaborate on that e.g. how niche is that situation? What are these security regulations?

Obviously when you are driving you should not be touching your phone (exact legislation will depend on your location) but for the glorious day that BT HSP works, that would take away a legal argument that the phone should be hibernated while driving. (There’s also the possibility that you are driving with someone else and your passenger can answer the phone manually.)

Or maybe you are talking about an airline scenario? (I thought the whole flightmode thing is mostly rubbish but I could be wrong.)

Obviously there is a basic IT security condition that must be met for hibernation to be viable on an ostensibly secure phone i.e. encryption.

Equally obviously the Librem 5 is not so blessed with disk space that everyone will necessarily want to give up about 10% of the disk for the purposes of hibernation. But that’s fine. Linux is about choice. The choice of not giving up that disk space and the choice to do so.

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#5

Yes, 100%. Maintaining my workspace is a great convenience. With NVME SSD and the cold boot times are negligible. Of course on my desktop it is not necessary. I just use standby there indefinitely. On my laptops I use hibernation.

I don’t think my specific case really helps the case for hibernation. I would just imagine hibernation being useful especially when you have a pre-defined amount of time that you wont be able to use your phone anyway. In my case it has to do with the classification of work I am doing, etc.

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