Ask the heading says it.

Does hibernation support for laptop requires the a swap partition?

No, hibernation uses a special partition, usually created by a utility that the computer manufacturer provides for the given BIOS. Linux software suspend uses the swap partition.

Thanks. That is the answer I was looking for.

Got to use carve out a swap partition then.

But is sofware suspend safe/recommended in Linux?

How about suspend to RAM? Is it safe/recommended?

Software suspend is a completely Linux operation, with no interaction or support with a BIOS. It is not yet part of the mainline kernel, mostly because there are still some issues that need to be resolved.

Suspend to RAM is a BIOS implemented function, that Linux interacts with. There are issue with it as well, in particular some drivers don't behave well.

If you are interested in the function, try it on your specific configuration; either or both might work. I personally don't find it all that useful, since the majority of the applications I run are network-based. They all have to be closed down manually anyway, otherwise they will timeout during the suspend/hibernate. If you run mostly local, non-network applications, and you don't use any problematic drivers, suspend/hibernate may save you some time. Big if.

Thanks macenoneta.

Thinking that probably it is not worth the effort of setting Software Suspend up.

I use Mac Os X on iBook. Which I'll shutdown if I don't use it for a prolong time. So, I gather that software suspend isn't necessary then for Linux on Laptop for my case.

I have used Software Suspend on Mandrake 10.1, and my experience was this:

1) It puked until I increased swapspace to about 1.5x my RAM
2) It made wireless puke with ndiswrapper <1.x
3) When it did work, it did not save much time over just shutting-down/rebooting (YMMV if you have a lot of stuff in your initscripts)

In sum, it can work reliably once you have it working at all, but the gain is kinda minimal.