A patch series sent out for review this weekend can significantly improve the system hibernation performance under Linux. Particularly for those with slower SSDs, the patches can make Linux hibernate up to several times faster.
Linux kernel developer Kairui Song is working on improving hibernation performance with the new swap allocator that originally didn’t provide a high performance allocation path for hibernate. This new fast allocation path is especially beneficial for SSD devices with poor 4K performance.
At an extreme, the Samsung 830 SSD that uses Serial ATA 2.0 the Linux 6.19 kernel takes 324 seconds to hibernate but with the two new patches it can drop down to just 35 seconds!
For faster storage devices the performance improvement is marginal but again especially for those drives with poor 4K write performance a magnificent speed-up can be observed where “the performance is several times better.”
The patches amount to just reworking a little more than two dozen lines of code in the kernel’s swap file code. The code is under review and too late for the v7.0 cycle but we’ll see if it’s ready by the v7.1 kernel release mid-year.
