Power management system and method

摘要

The present invention relates to a power management system and method. The current ACPI specification defines data that should be saved to a non-volatile storage medium to allow recovery from a sleeping state. However, the ACPI specification does not address 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 the compression of data representing the system memory context prior to the system memory context data being saved to a non-volatile storage medium. The compression 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.