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by emidln 3172 days ago
Actually, you probably could. If you write the hibernate image to a place using a machine-id of some sort. Imagine you have images like

    /hibernate/machine/5c76f5e0-9117-4e33-8093-9de2e2f1b6de
    /hibernate/machine/d755fe2c-2b13-4436-8a5b-ba3363b9c642
When your kernel boots up, it grabs its machine-id and looks for a hibernation image to map into its memory. If it finds one, great, you have an "instant wake". If it doesn't, you boot as normal. Now imagine that your kernel tries to mount a specific device to `/hibernate` prior to looking for hibernate images. Upon hibernating, it writes its image to its machine-id. You could easily share the disk between two machines (even of different architectures) and keep two separate hiberante images on disk. You wouldn't be sharing the processes, but you could share your data.

With a sophisticated enough setup, you could probably even dual-install binaries (although this would be much involved with ELF where you must have separate binaries compared to something like Mach-O) to something like /usr/bin_x86_64/ and /usr/bin_arm64/ and then use your shell to select your path. This might work on a system level, but would certainly work on a per-install basis manually.
2 comments
fragmede 3172 days ago
Stick a hypervisor and (some sort of) NFS share in the mix to sidestep having to know about the layout of fs blocks on disk . Also, just extend the linux kernel ELF loader to know about fat-binaries to make the scheme work - there were proposed patches to accomplish this that were (unfairly) derided, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that proposal.
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dpark 3172 days ago
This seems like a very different end result than what was desired. All your in-flight app and system state is still unique to each machine you connect to.

Maintaining disk consistency would also be a nightmare as each machine is unaware that it’s sharing the physical disk with other machines and they’re all clobbering each other with conflicting writes. You “boot” on machine A and suddenly all the files it was reading/writing have changed unexpectedly.

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