Suspend and hibernation status report

Posted Jul 28, 2007 5:29 UTC (Sat) by moxfyre (guest, #13847)
In reply to: Suspend and hibernation status report by rjw@sisk.pl
Parent article: Suspend and hibernation status report

Very impressive article! It sounds, well, extraordinarily complex... how much of this code can be shared with other kernel subsystems?

Would suspend/hibernation be easier to implement and maintain if BIOS/ACPI support were changed in some drastic way? Say, if we were all using LinuxBIOS or something like that?

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Suspend and hibernation status report

Posted Jul 28, 2007 12:29 UTC (Sat) by rjw@sisk.pl (subscriber, #39252) [Link]

> Very impressive article! It sounds, well, extraordinarily complex... how
> much of this code can be shared with other kernel subsystems?

Unfortunately, not much. We do our best to reuse the existing code, but this is not always possible.

> Would suspend/hibernation be easier to implement and maintain if BIOS/ACPI
> support were changed in some drastic way? Say, if we were all using
> LinuxBIOS or something like that?

Well, it could help. For example, if the BIOS (I prefer to call it the platform firmware) were able to post the graphics adapters during a resume, such things like s2ram wouldn't be necessary. Also, if the platform firmware source code were known to us, it would be easier to program the kernel side of things.

On the other hand, there are some problems related to hibernation that have nothing to do with the platform firmware (memory management, the handling of tasks, image saving/loading).