TuxOnIce - Features

TuxOnIce's features include:

• Image compression (LZF - very fast and highly recommended).
• Full asynchronous I/O and readahead for synchronous I/O for maximum throughput.
• Multithreaded compression & I/O.
• Support for any number of swap partitions and/or files.
• Support for using an ordinary file instead of swap.
• The ability to cancel hibernating or restoring the image by pressing escape.
• Support for saving a full image of your memory, resulting in a fast, responsive system after resuming.
• The ability to specify a maximum image size.
• Support for plugins: data transformers (compression, encryption) and new storage backends (NFS support is planned).
• Works out of the box for most configurations.
• Nice user interface (GenSplash compatible).
• Scripting support.
• Speed and reliability - TuxOnIce has been extensively tested in a variety of configurations over many years. It is not guaranteed to be perfect, but bugs found will be hunted and fixed quickly.
• Can be configured to be a drop-in replacement for swsusp (for swap partitions - swap files are configured more simply with TuxOnIce).
• Preliminary FUSE support.
• (Work in progress:) Cluster support.

Suspend-to-disk implementations explained

Since the original Software Suspend code was written by Gabor Kuti and Pavel Machek back in 1998, four different implementations have been created for the 2.6 kernel, all forks of the same original codebase. Here is a quick comparison between the three that still exist. The first column refers to CONFIG_HIBERNATION in the 2.6 kernel. pmdisk has been merged back into the original "swsusp" implementation in the kernel, and hence is no longer listed here. The second column is userspace swsusp, developed by Rafael Wysocki. The third refers to what is now commonly called "TuxOnIce" (previously Suspend2) and is what this site largely deals with.