OT: Mechanism of Laptop's Suspend to Disc.

[Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.demon.co.uk>]

Hi,

This isn't really Kernel material but it's the best place to ask I know
of.  If you know of somewhere better please tell me to buzz off over
there.

I've a Sony Vaio laptop that boots Linux.  I can trigger its `Suspend
to Disc' with a key combination and the current contents of RAM are
saved to a special partition and the machine powers off.  On power on
the machine notes that the partition isn't empty and restores the
machine to its previous state.

That's my understanding.  I'd like to understand what parts Linux is
involved with, presumably handling the keypress and asking the BIOS to
write to the partition, and what the BIOS is doing, I guess restoring
after power on.

Why?  Well, the laptop dual boots with W98 and I can't help thinking
that it would be a `poor man's Plex86' if you could suspend Linux to
disc and then restore a W98 that I had earlier, or another Linux for
that matter.  Probably by having multiple special partitions as the
BIOS would need to know and provide me with a selection.

What do people think?  Would it be possible without BIOS intervention?
I'd guess not.  In that case, why don't BIOS writers consider this as a
useful addition?


Ralph.

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