Installer creates too small swap partition (hibernation fails)

[Tobin Davis]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

ubiquity installer created 384M swap partition on 8G ssd Acer Aspire One with 1G ram. With this little space, hibernation is impossible.

This is with jaunty-netbook-remix-i386.img daily (Alpha 6).

[Tobin Davis (gruemaster)]

Same issue with jaunty-mid-lpia.img.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Please attach /var/log/installer/syslog and /var/log/installer/partman so I can see what the autopartitioner was doing.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

this may need to be release-noted, but there's insufficient info yet to document it; task opened so we don't forget.

[Tobin Davis (gruemaster)]

Here's the partman log from /var/log/installer

[Tobin Davis (gruemaster)]

And syslog from /var/log/installer

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

OK. Looks like swap in the standard autopartitioning recipe is just not weighted high enough. We could release-note this to say that hibernation may not necessarily be available if you use automatic partitioning, unless you take care to ensure that the swap partition is at least as large as RAM.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

added to the release notes.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

AFAICS this bug has been triaged, marking as such.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

and marking as 'high' importance since this was in the 9.10 release notes

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I really should have dealt with this for Lucid, but I don't think it would be wise to change it now. We'll carry over the release note and revisit for Maverick. Sorry.

[ceg (ceg)]

Its an LTS version, not want to have it install well at least with its first point release?

[Nathan Hartley (treestryder)]

I know this may not be the same problem, but this bug was as close a match as I could find.

I have 768 MB of physical memory, the installer created a 881 MB swap partition, everything looks fine in org.freedesktop.upower.policy, it worked in 9.10 and yet... I do not have the option to hibernate.

Any ideas?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Nathan: Please open a new bug. There's no point in mixing different issues on the same report. I think in your case the swap partition may be too small to hold both the RAM and already present swap memory, but this would need investigation. Just try hibernating right after starting the system, and see if that works.

[Nathan Hartley (treestryder)]

Milan: I almost took the time to open a new bug. Unfortunately, after 27+ years of working with computers, I am starting to have fits of "I just want it to work!"

In this case, I had just done a fresh install of 10.04 and found all of the other quirks on my Dell C400 to have been fixed, but now there was this new hibernation issue. The research I did showed it was either the encrypted home folder or the size of the swap partition. I tried your suggestion to hibernate after starting but the option was not available. I looked up the command, pm-hibernate, and tried that... it went down for a second and came right back up. I then dug around in the countless logs to no avails. Needing to get my laptop running as soon as possible and having to leave the house in an hour, I decided just to reinstall with a 2 GB swap (overkill) and no encrypted home directory.

Everything works fine now.

Thanks for trying.

[Jānis Kangarooo (kangarooo)]

i did manual install and put swap to be 1024 so it should be 1024 mb but now in system monitor i see its 976.0 mb
also ram is showing smalled - 1002.4 mb
why ?

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

Documented at <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/ReleaseNotes>.

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

So we need to either fix this in Natty or remove the "Hibernate" option all together. FWIW, I don't believe Ubuntu on Mac users have this option, so there is precedence already.

[George Dhoore (georgiepoo)]

Removing hibernate altogether just seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, if I may use such a cliché phrase. This bug doesn't seem like something that would take a major re-engineering effort to fix, though to be honest my knowledge of such things is low.

My vote, for what its worth, would be to fix the autopartitioner logic unless something else comes up that makes hibernate nonfunctional for the majority of users.

[MillenniumBug (millenniumbug)]

For people not using hibernation the settings in the original example seem fine (if the drive is only 8 GB, one does not want to waste to much space on swap).

If the autopartitioning logic is changed, it would be nice to add any changes only as options, keeping the present partitioning scheme as another option.

[Gaurav Chugh (chughgaurav)]

I too have the same hibernate issue , I have 3086420 kB RAM , the Ubuntu made swap of about 470 MB , then I increased the swap size to 3087352 kB , but still I am unable to hibernate my notebook .

[Gaurav Chugh (chughgaurav)]

Finally the issue resolved after increasing the swap memory size and then installing hibernate 1.99-1.1 . Now I can hibernate my notebook finally .

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I see no need to remove the hibernate option, certainly.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package partman-auto - 93ubuntu3

---------------
partman-auto (93ubuntu3) natty; urgency=low

  * Change the x86 atomic recipes to make the minimum swap size be 100% of
    RAM, so that hibernate always works (LP: #345126).
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:43:31 +0000

[Pablo Hörtner (redtux2000)]

Are you sure this has been successfully fixed? I am testing natty and although the swap partition has sized a bit bigger than my RAM, i am missing the hibernate option in the power off menu. Is the package hibernate needed for that? If so, I might file another bug report (it is not installed on my system).

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

Hello RedTux
Please post the output of
dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest="org.freedesktop.UPower" --type=method_call --reply-timeout=6000 /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get string:org.freedesktop.UPower string:CanHibernate