About Kernel Documentation Linux Kernel Contact Linux Resources Linux Blog

Documentation / power / swsusp.txt




Custom Search

Based on kernel version 3.9. Page generated on 2013-05-02 23:12 EST.

1	Some warnings, first.
2	
3	 * BIG FAT WARNING *********************************************************
4	 *
5	 * If you touch anything on disk between suspend and resume...
6	 *				...kiss your data goodbye.
7	 *
8	 * If you do resume from initrd after your filesystems are mounted...
9	 *				...bye bye root partition.
10	 *			[this is actually same case as above]
11	 *
12	 * If you have unsupported (*) devices using DMA, you may have some
13	 * problems. If your disk driver does not support suspend... (IDE does),
14	 * it may cause some problems, too. If you change kernel command line
15	 * between suspend and resume, it may do something wrong. If you change
16	 * your hardware while system is suspended... well, it was not good idea;
17	 * but it will probably only crash.
18	 *
19	 * (*) suspend/resume support is needed to make it safe.
20	 *
21	 * If you have any filesystems on USB devices mounted before software suspend,
22	 * they won't be accessible after resume and you may lose data, as though
23	 * you have unplugged the USB devices with mounted filesystems on them;
24	 * see the FAQ below for details.  (This is not true for more traditional
25	 * power states like "standby", which normally don't turn USB off.)
26	
27	You need to append resume=/dev/your_swap_partition to kernel command
28	line. Then you suspend by
29	
30	echo shutdown > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
31	
32	. If you feel ACPI works pretty well on your system, you might try
33	
34	echo platform > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
35	
36	. If you would like to write hibernation image to swap and then suspend
37	to RAM (provided your platform supports it), you can try
38	
39	echo suspend > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
40	
41	. If you have SATA disks, you'll need recent kernels with SATA suspend
42	support. For suspend and resume to work, make sure your disk drivers
43	are built into kernel -- not modules. [There's way to make
44	suspend/resume with modular disk drivers, see FAQ, but you probably
45	should not do that.]
46	
47	If you want to limit the suspend image size to N bytes, do
48	
49	echo N > /sys/power/image_size
50	
51	before suspend (it is limited to 500 MB by default).
52	
53	
54	Article about goals and implementation of Software Suspend for Linux
55	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
56	Author: Gábor Kuti
57	Last revised: 2003-10-20 by Pavel Machek
58	
59	Idea and goals to achieve
60	
61	Nowadays it is common in several laptops that they have a suspend button. It
62	saves the state of the machine to a filesystem or to a partition and switches
63	to standby mode. Later resuming the machine the saved state is loaded back to
64	ram and the machine can continue its work. It has two real benefits. First we
65	save ourselves the time machine goes down and later boots up, energy costs
66	are real high when running from batteries. The other gain is that we don't have to
67	interrupt our programs so processes that are calculating something for a long
68	time shouldn't need to be written interruptible.
69	
70	swsusp saves the state of the machine into active swaps and then reboots or
71	powerdowns.  You must explicitly specify the swap partition to resume from with
72	``resume='' kernel option. If signature is found it loads and restores saved
73	state. If the option ``noresume'' is specified as a boot parameter, it skips
74	the resuming.  If the option ``hibernate=nocompress'' is specified as a boot
75	parameter, it saves hibernation image without compression.
76	
77	In the meantime while the system is suspended you should not add/remove any
78	of the hardware, write to the filesystems, etc.
79	
80	Sleep states summary
81	====================
82	
83	There are three different interfaces you can use, /proc/acpi should
84	work like this:
85	
86	In a really perfect world:
87	echo 1 > /proc/acpi/sleep       # for standby
88	echo 2 > /proc/acpi/sleep       # for suspend to ram
89	echo 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep       # for suspend to ram, but with more power conservative
90	echo 4 > /proc/acpi/sleep       # for suspend to disk
91	echo 5 > /proc/acpi/sleep       # for shutdown unfriendly the system
92	
93	and perhaps
94	echo 4b > /proc/acpi/sleep      # for suspend to disk via s4bios
95	
96	Frequently Asked Questions
97	==========================
98	
99	Q: well, suspending a server is IMHO a really stupid thing,
100	but... (Diego Zuccato):
101	
102	A: You bought new UPS for your server. How do you install it without
103	bringing machine down? Suspend to disk, rearrange power cables,
104	resume.
105	
106	You have your server on UPS. Power died, and UPS is indicating 30
107	seconds to failure. What do you do? Suspend to disk.
108	
109	
110	Q: Maybe I'm missing something, but why don't the regular I/O paths work?
111	
112	A: We do use the regular I/O paths. However we cannot restore the data
113	to its original location as we load it. That would create an
114	inconsistent kernel state which would certainly result in an oops.
115	Instead, we load the image into unused memory and then atomically copy
116	it back to it original location. This implies, of course, a maximum
117	image size of half the amount of memory.
118	
119	There are two solutions to this:
120	
121	* require half of memory to be free during suspend. That way you can
122	read "new" data onto free spots, then cli and copy
123	
124	* assume we had special "polling" ide driver that only uses memory
125	between 0-640KB. That way, I'd have to make sure that 0-640KB is free
126	during suspending, but otherwise it would work...
127	
128	suspend2 shares this fundamental limitation, but does not include user
129	data and disk caches into "used memory" by saving them in
130	advance. That means that the limitation goes away in practice.
131	
132	Q: Does linux support ACPI S4?
133	
134	A: Yes. That's what echo platform > /sys/power/disk does.
135	
136	Q: What is 'suspend2'?
137	
138	A: suspend2 is 'Software Suspend 2', a forked implementation of
139	suspend-to-disk which is available as separate patches for 2.4 and 2.6
140	kernels from swsusp.sourceforge.net. It includes support for SMP, 4GB
141	highmem and preemption. It also has a extensible architecture that
142	allows for arbitrary transformations on the image (compression,
143	encryption) and arbitrary backends for writing the image (eg to swap
144	or an NFS share[Work In Progress]). Questions regarding suspend2
145	should be sent to the mailing list available through the suspend2
146	website, and not to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. We are working
147	toward merging suspend2 into the mainline kernel.
148	
149	Q: What is the freezing of tasks and why are we using it?
150	
151	A: The freezing of tasks is a mechanism by which user space processes and some
152	kernel threads are controlled during hibernation or system-wide suspend (on some
153	architectures).  See freezing-of-tasks.txt for details.
154	
155	Q: What is the difference between "platform" and "shutdown"?
156	
157	A:
158	
159	shutdown: save state in linux, then tell bios to powerdown
160	
161	platform: save state in linux, then tell bios to powerdown and blink
162	          "suspended led"
163	
164	"platform" is actually right thing to do where supported, but
165	"shutdown" is most reliable (except on ACPI systems).
166	
167	Q: I do not understand why you have such strong objections to idea of
168	selective suspend.
169	
170	A: Do selective suspend during runtime power management, that's okay. But
171	it's useless for suspend-to-disk. (And I do not see how you could use
172	it for suspend-to-ram, I hope you do not want that).
173	
174	Lets see, so you suggest to
175	
176	* SUSPEND all but swap device and parents
177	* Snapshot
178	* Write image to disk
179	* SUSPEND swap device and parents
180	* Powerdown
181	
182	Oh no, that does not work, if swap device or its parents uses DMA,
183	you've corrupted data. You'd have to do
184	
185	* SUSPEND all but swap device and parents
186	* FREEZE swap device and parents
187	* Snapshot
188	* UNFREEZE swap device and parents
189	* Write
190	* SUSPEND swap device and parents
191	
192	Which means that you still need that FREEZE state, and you get more
193	complicated code. (And I have not yet introduce details like system
194	devices).
195	
196	Q: There don't seem to be any generally useful behavioral
197	distinctions between SUSPEND and FREEZE.
198	
199	A: Doing SUSPEND when you are asked to do FREEZE is always correct,
200	but it may be unnecessarily slow. If you want your driver to stay simple,
201	slowness may not matter to you. It can always be fixed later.
202	
203	For devices like disk it does matter, you do not want to spindown for
204	FREEZE.
205	
206	Q: After resuming, system is paging heavily, leading to very bad interactivity.
207	
208	A: Try running
209	
210	cat `cat /proc/[0-9]*/maps | grep / | sed 's:.* /:/:' | sort -u` > /dev/null
211	
212	after resume. swapoff -a; swapon -a may also be useful.
213	
214	Q: What happens to devices during swsusp? They seem to be resumed
215	during system suspend?
216	
217	A: That's correct. We need to resume them if we want to write image to
218	disk. Whole sequence goes like
219	
220	      Suspend part
221	      ~~~~~~~~~~~~
222	      running system, user asks for suspend-to-disk
223	
224	      user processes are stopped
225	
226	      suspend(PMSG_FREEZE): devices are frozen so that they don't interfere
227	      		      with state snapshot
228	
229	      state snapshot: copy of whole used memory is taken with interrupts disabled
230	
231	      resume(): devices are woken up so that we can write image to swap
232	
233	      write image to swap
234	
235	      suspend(PMSG_SUSPEND): suspend devices so that we can power off
236	
237	      turn the power off
238	
239	      Resume part
240	      ~~~~~~~~~~~
241	      (is actually pretty similar)
242	
243	      running system, user asks for suspend-to-disk
244	
245	      user processes are stopped (in common case there are none, but with resume-from-initrd, no one knows)
246	
247	      read image from disk
248	
249	      suspend(PMSG_FREEZE): devices are frozen so that they don't interfere
250	      		      with image restoration
251	
252	      image restoration: rewrite memory with image
253	
254	      resume(): devices are woken up so that system can continue
255	
256	      thaw all user processes
257	
258	Q: What is this 'Encrypt suspend image' for?
259	
260	A: First of all: it is not a replacement for dm-crypt encrypted swap.
261	It cannot protect your computer while it is suspended. Instead it does
262	protect from leaking sensitive data after resume from suspend.
263	
264	Think of the following: you suspend while an application is running
265	that keeps sensitive data in memory. The application itself prevents
266	the data from being swapped out. Suspend, however, must write these
267	data to swap to be able to resume later on. Without suspend encryption
268	your sensitive data are then stored in plaintext on disk.  This means
269	that after resume your sensitive data are accessible to all
270	applications having direct access to the swap device which was used
271	for suspend. If you don't need swap after resume these data can remain
272	on disk virtually forever. Thus it can happen that your system gets
273	broken in weeks later and sensitive data which you thought were
274	encrypted and protected are retrieved and stolen from the swap device.
275	To prevent this situation you should use 'Encrypt suspend image'.
276	
277	During suspend a temporary key is created and this key is used to
278	encrypt the data written to disk. When, during resume, the data was
279	read back into memory the temporary key is destroyed which simply
280	means that all data written to disk during suspend are then
281	inaccessible so they can't be stolen later on.  The only thing that
282	you must then take care of is that you call 'mkswap' for the swap
283	partition used for suspend as early as possible during regular
284	boot. This asserts that any temporary key from an oopsed suspend or
285	from a failed or aborted resume is erased from the swap device.
286	
287	As a rule of thumb use encrypted swap to protect your data while your
288	system is shut down or suspended. Additionally use the encrypted
289	suspend image to prevent sensitive data from being stolen after
290	resume.
291	
292	Q: Can I suspend to a swap file?
293	
294	A: Generally, yes, you can.  However, it requires you to use the "resume=" and
295	"resume_offset=" kernel command line parameters, so the resume from a swap file
296	cannot be initiated from an initrd or initramfs image.  See
297	swsusp-and-swap-files.txt for details.
298	
299	Q: Is there a maximum system RAM size that is supported by swsusp?
300	
301	A: It should work okay with highmem.
302	
303	Q: Does swsusp (to disk) use only one swap partition or can it use
304	multiple swap partitions (aggregate them into one logical space)?
305	
306	A: Only one swap partition, sorry.
307	
308	Q: If my application(s) causes lots of memory & swap space to be used
309	(over half of the total system RAM), is it correct that it is likely
310	to be useless to try to suspend to disk while that app is running?
311	
312	A: No, it should work okay, as long as your app does not mlock()
313	it. Just prepare big enough swap partition.
314	
315	Q: What information is useful for debugging suspend-to-disk problems?
316	
317	A: Well, last messages on the screen are always useful. If something
318	is broken, it is usually some kernel driver, therefore trying with as
319	little as possible modules loaded helps a lot. I also prefer people to
320	suspend from console, preferably without X running. Booting with
321	init=/bin/bash, then swapon and starting suspend sequence manually
322	usually does the trick. Then it is good idea to try with latest
323	vanilla kernel.
324	
325	Q: How can distributions ship a swsusp-supporting kernel with modular
326	disk drivers (especially SATA)?
327	
328	A: Well, it can be done, load the drivers, then do echo into
329	/sys/power/disk/resume file from initrd. Be sure not to mount
330	anything, not even read-only mount, or you are going to lose your
331	data.
332	
333	Q: How do I make suspend more verbose?
334	
335	A: If you want to see any non-error kernel messages on the virtual
336	terminal the kernel switches to during suspend, you have to set the
337	kernel console loglevel to at least 4 (KERN_WARNING), for example by
338	doing
339	
340		# save the old loglevel
341		read LOGLEVEL DUMMY < /proc/sys/kernel/printk
342		# set the loglevel so we see the progress bar.
343		# if the level is higher than needed, we leave it alone.
344		if [ $LOGLEVEL -lt 5 ]; then
345		        echo 5 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
346			fi
347	
348	        IMG_SZ=0
349	        read IMG_SZ < /sys/power/image_size
350	        echo -n disk > /sys/power/state
351	        RET=$?
352	        #
353	        # the logic here is:
354	        # if image_size > 0 (without kernel support, IMG_SZ will be zero),
355	        # then try again with image_size set to zero.
356		if [ $RET -ne 0 -a $IMG_SZ -ne 0 ]; then # try again with minimal image size
357	                echo 0 > /sys/power/image_size
358	                echo -n disk > /sys/power/state
359	                RET=$?
360	        fi
361	
362		# restore previous loglevel
363		echo $LOGLEVEL > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
364		exit $RET
365	
366	Q: Is this true that if I have a mounted filesystem on a USB device and
367	I suspend to disk, I can lose data unless the filesystem has been mounted
368	with "sync"?
369	
370	A: That's right ... if you disconnect that device, you may lose data.
371	In fact, even with "-o sync" you can lose data if your programs have
372	information in buffers they haven't written out to a disk you disconnect,
373	or if you disconnect before the device finished saving data you wrote.
374	
375	Software suspend normally powers down USB controllers, which is equivalent
376	to disconnecting all USB devices attached to your system.
377	
378	Your system might well support low-power modes for its USB controllers
379	while the system is asleep, maintaining the connection, using true sleep
380	modes like "suspend-to-RAM" or "standby".  (Don't write "disk" to the
381	/sys/power/state file; write "standby" or "mem".)  We've not seen any
382	hardware that can use these modes through software suspend, although in
383	theory some systems might support "platform" modes that won't break the
384	USB connections.
385	
386	Remember that it's always a bad idea to unplug a disk drive containing a
387	mounted filesystem.  That's true even when your system is asleep!  The
388	safest thing is to unmount all filesystems on removable media (such USB,
389	Firewire, CompactFlash, MMC, external SATA, or even IDE hotplug bays)
390	before suspending; then remount them after resuming.
391	
392	There is a work-around for this problem.  For more information, see
393	Documentation/usb/persist.txt.
394	
395	Q: Can I suspend-to-disk using a swap partition under LVM?
396	
397	A: No. You can suspend successfully, but you'll not be able to
398	resume. uswsusp should be able to work with LVM. See suspend.sf.net.
399	
400	Q: I upgraded the kernel from 2.6.15 to 2.6.16. Both kernels were
401	compiled with the similar configuration files. Anyway I found that
402	suspend to disk (and resume) is much slower on 2.6.16 compared to
403	2.6.15. Any idea for why that might happen or how can I speed it up?
404	
405	A: This is because the size of the suspend image is now greater than
406	for 2.6.15 (by saving more data we can get more responsive system
407	after resume).
408	
409	There's the /sys/power/image_size knob that controls the size of the
410	image.  If you set it to 0 (eg. by echo 0 > /sys/power/image_size as
411	root), the 2.6.15 behavior should be restored.  If it is still too
412	slow, take a look at suspend.sf.net -- userland suspend is faster and
413	supports LZF compression to speed it up further.
Hide Line Numbers
About Kernel Documentation Linux Kernel Contact Linux Resources Linux Blog

Information is copyright its respective author. All material is available from the Linux Kernel Source distributed under a GPL License. This page is provided as a free service by mjmwired.net.