摘要 |
The present invention relates to a power management system and method for a computer system. The current ACPI specification defines data that should be saved to a non-volatile storage medium to recover from a sleeping state. However, the ACPI specification does not support restoration of the system context following a power failure during a sleeping state. The RAM image includes all applications and data that are currently resident in RAM together with device register values that may be lost during a reduced power consumption state of the computer system. It will be appreciated that it takes a significant amount of time to collate and save the data required to maintain the system context of the client machine. Suitably, the present invention provides for saving, to a non-volatile storage medium, data representing only a portion of the system memory context. Saving the only the useful portions of the system memory context results in fewer bytes needing to be saved to the non-volatile storage medium. This, in turn, saves power since the non-volatile storage medium is operable for a shorter period of time. There are fewer read/write operations and preferably fewer disk-head movements in the case of an HDD.
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