Hi all,
Is there a method out there that can “save a hibernate state” to disk, and just permanently boot immediately into that state every time?
It would be OK to lose data used after this point. And ot would also be OK if it required building a custom image based on the hardware, similar to embedded systems.
The goal is to be able to, as quickly as possible, spin up a GPU server when needed, but without using suspend/resume.
Thanks.
Are we talking physical servers like Poweredge or Proliant? Those take a long time to boot, especially with lots of RAM. Why can’t you use suspend/resume?
And modern servers don’t really consume a lot of power while idle. You can configure them to downclock the CPU and GPU while idle just like a desktop or laptop.
But if you really wanted it, you could boot an immutable distro and mount user partitions tmpfs. Or use a portable distro and discard the state. Or a filesystem with snapshots and roll back on each shutdown or boot. But none of those are really going to get you instant boot. Linux boots pretty quick, but not instant.
Desktop with GPUs. I’ve tried immutable, but that really doesn’t impact boot speed. It’s still the same startup procedure. And I use ZFS, so I could roll back (or use tmpfs), but that still requires the full boot process.
What’s your use case or broader goal? In some specific cases you might be able to use a VM instead of a bare metal server. The host would be idling all the time, but the VM can start from a snapshot near instantly