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Virt Guest Suspend/Hibernate support

Summary

Linux guests don't do S3/S4 properly right now due to missing functionality in the virtio layer to save state before hibernation and restore it after resume. The plan is to extend virtio and individual virtio drivers to handle hibernation.

Owner

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 18
  • Last updated: June 6 2012
  • Percentage of completion: 60%

Detailed Description

Hibernation is a standard feature on most OSes. Users can put the OS is a hibernation mode, switch off the computer, and later, on the next restart, continue from where they left off, including all their open browsing sessions and document editors. So far, Linux guests with virtio drivers haven't been able to resume properly after hibernation. This work will fix that, and users will be able to experience hibernation as they are used to on KVM-optimised paravirtual guests.

Benefit to Fedora

  • Virtual machines act more like physical machines, which allows for better testing of the distro in a VM.
  • Interesting feature to market for F18.

Scope

  • Kernel suspend/resume support for virtio (DONE)
  • S3/S4 Support in QEMU, Seabios (DONE)
  • Get package versions into Fedora (still need qemu 1.1)
  • Libvirt API support? (Not sure of the scope...)

How To Test

TBD

User Experience

Virt users will now actually be able to suspend or hibernate their VMs like they would on a physical machine.

Dependencies

Kernel 3.4, which is already queued for F17.

Contingency Plan

Since this is brand new functionality, if it doesn't make it in time for F18, nothing has changed. We just drop this feature page.

Documentation

Release Notes

Comments and Discussion