summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/Documentation/power/swsusp.rst
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/power/swsusp.rst')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/power/swsusp.rst503
1 files changed, 503 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/power/swsusp.rst b/Documentation/power/swsusp.rst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..8524f079e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/power/swsusp.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,503 @@
+============
+Swap suspend
+============
+
+Some warnings, first.
+
+.. warning::
+
+ **BIG FAT WARNING**
+
+ If you touch anything on disk between suspend and resume...
+ ...kiss your data goodbye.
+
+ If you do resume from initrd after your filesystems are mounted...
+ ...bye bye root partition.
+
+ [this is actually same case as above]
+
+ If you have unsupported ( ) devices using DMA, you may have some
+ problems. If your disk driver does not support suspend... (IDE does),
+ it may cause some problems, too. If you change kernel command line
+ between suspend and resume, it may do something wrong. If you change
+ your hardware while system is suspended... well, it was not good idea;
+ but it will probably only crash.
+
+ ( ) suspend/resume support is needed to make it safe.
+
+ If you have any filesystems on USB devices mounted before software suspend,
+ they won't be accessible after resume and you may lose data, as though
+ you have unplugged the USB devices with mounted filesystems on them;
+ see the FAQ below for details. (This is not true for more traditional
+ power states like "standby", which normally don't turn USB off.)
+
+Swap partition:
+ You need to append resume=/dev/your_swap_partition to kernel command
+ line or specify it using /sys/power/resume.
+
+Swap file:
+ If using a swapfile you can also specify a resume offset using
+ resume_offset=<number> on the kernel command line or specify it
+ in /sys/power/resume_offset.
+
+After preparing then you suspend by::
+
+ echo shutdown > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
+
+- If you feel ACPI works pretty well on your system, you might try::
+
+ echo platform > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
+
+- If you would like to write hibernation image to swap and then suspend
+ to RAM (provided your platform supports it), you can try::
+
+ echo suspend > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
+
+- If you have SATA disks, you'll need recent kernels with SATA suspend
+ support. For suspend and resume to work, make sure your disk drivers
+ are built into kernel -- not modules. [There's way to make
+ suspend/resume with modular disk drivers, see FAQ, but you probably
+ should not do that.]
+
+If you want to limit the suspend image size to N bytes, do::
+
+ echo N > /sys/power/image_size
+
+before suspend (it is limited to around 2/5 of available RAM by default).
+
+- The resume process checks for the presence of the resume device,
+ if found, it then checks the contents for the hibernation image signature.
+ If both are found, it resumes the hibernation image.
+
+- The resume process may be triggered in two ways:
+
+ 1) During lateinit: If resume=/dev/your_swap_partition is specified on
+ the kernel command line, lateinit runs the resume process. If the
+ resume device has not been probed yet, the resume process fails and
+ bootup continues.
+ 2) Manually from an initrd or initramfs: May be run from
+ the init script by using the /sys/power/resume file. It is vital
+ that this be done prior to remounting any filesystems (even as
+ read-only) otherwise data may be corrupted.
+
+Article about goals and implementation of Software Suspend for Linux
+====================================================================
+
+Author: Gábor Kuti
+Last revised: 2003-10-20 by Pavel Machek
+
+Idea and goals to achieve
+-------------------------
+
+Nowadays it is common in several laptops that they have a suspend button. It
+saves the state of the machine to a filesystem or to a partition and switches
+to standby mode. Later resuming the machine the saved state is loaded back to
+ram and the machine can continue its work. It has two real benefits. First we
+save ourselves the time machine goes down and later boots up, energy costs
+are real high when running from batteries. The other gain is that we don't have
+to interrupt our programs so processes that are calculating something for a long
+time shouldn't need to be written interruptible.
+
+swsusp saves the state of the machine into active swaps and then reboots or
+powerdowns. You must explicitly specify the swap partition to resume from with
+`resume=` kernel option. If signature is found it loads and restores saved
+state. If the option `noresume` is specified as a boot parameter, it skips
+the resuming. If the option `hibernate=nocompress` is specified as a boot
+parameter, it saves hibernation image without compression.
+
+In the meantime while the system is suspended you should not add/remove any
+of the hardware, write to the filesystems, etc.
+
+Sleep states summary
+====================
+
+There are three different interfaces you can use, /proc/acpi should
+work like this:
+
+In a really perfect world::
+
+ echo 1 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for standby
+ echo 2 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for suspend to ram
+ echo 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for suspend to ram, but with more power
+ # conservative
+ echo 4 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for suspend to disk
+ echo 5 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for shutdown unfriendly the system
+
+and perhaps::
+
+ echo 4b > /proc/acpi/sleep # for suspend to disk via s4bios
+
+Frequently Asked Questions
+==========================
+
+Q:
+ well, suspending a server is IMHO a really stupid thing,
+ but... (Diego Zuccato):
+
+A:
+ You bought new UPS for your server. How do you install it without
+ bringing machine down? Suspend to disk, rearrange power cables,
+ resume.
+
+ You have your server on UPS. Power died, and UPS is indicating 30
+ seconds to failure. What do you do? Suspend to disk.
+
+
+Q:
+ Maybe I'm missing something, but why don't the regular I/O paths work?
+
+A:
+ We do use the regular I/O paths. However we cannot restore the data
+ to its original location as we load it. That would create an
+ inconsistent kernel state which would certainly result in an oops.
+ Instead, we load the image into unused memory and then atomically copy
+ it back to it original location. This implies, of course, a maximum
+ image size of half the amount of memory.
+
+ There are two solutions to this:
+
+ * require half of memory to be free during suspend. That way you can
+ read "new" data onto free spots, then cli and copy
+
+ * assume we had special "polling" ide driver that only uses memory
+ between 0-640KB. That way, I'd have to make sure that 0-640KB is free
+ during suspending, but otherwise it would work...
+
+ suspend2 shares this fundamental limitation, but does not include user
+ data and disk caches into "used memory" by saving them in
+ advance. That means that the limitation goes away in practice.
+
+Q:
+ Does linux support ACPI S4?
+
+A:
+ Yes. That's what echo platform > /sys/power/disk does.
+
+Q:
+ What is 'suspend2'?
+
+A:
+ suspend2 is 'Software Suspend 2', a forked implementation of
+ suspend-to-disk which is available as separate patches for 2.4 and 2.6
+ kernels from swsusp.sourceforge.net. It includes support for SMP, 4GB
+ highmem and preemption. It also has a extensible architecture that
+ allows for arbitrary transformations on the image (compression,
+ encryption) and arbitrary backends for writing the image (eg to swap
+ or an NFS share[Work In Progress]). Questions regarding suspend2
+ should be sent to the mailing list available through the suspend2
+ website, and not to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. We are working
+ toward merging suspend2 into the mainline kernel.
+
+Q:
+ What is the freezing of tasks and why are we using it?
+
+A:
+ The freezing of tasks is a mechanism by which user space processes and some
+ kernel threads are controlled during hibernation or system-wide suspend (on
+ some architectures). See freezing-of-tasks.txt for details.
+
+Q:
+ What is the difference between "platform" and "shutdown"?
+
+A:
+ shutdown:
+ save state in linux, then tell bios to powerdown
+
+ platform:
+ save state in linux, then tell bios to powerdown and blink
+ "suspended led"
+
+ "platform" is actually right thing to do where supported, but
+ "shutdown" is most reliable (except on ACPI systems).
+
+Q:
+ I do not understand why you have such strong objections to idea of
+ selective suspend.
+
+A:
+ Do selective suspend during runtime power management, that's okay. But
+ it's useless for suspend-to-disk. (And I do not see how you could use
+ it for suspend-to-ram, I hope you do not want that).
+
+ Lets see, so you suggest to
+
+ * SUSPEND all but swap device and parents
+ * Snapshot
+ * Write image to disk
+ * SUSPEND swap device and parents
+ * Powerdown
+
+ Oh no, that does not work, if swap device or its parents uses DMA,
+ you've corrupted data. You'd have to do
+
+ * SUSPEND all but swap device and parents
+ * FREEZE swap device and parents
+ * Snapshot
+ * UNFREEZE swap device and parents
+ * Write
+ * SUSPEND swap device and parents
+
+ Which means that you still need that FREEZE state, and you get more
+ complicated code. (And I have not yet introduce details like system
+ devices).
+
+Q:
+ There don't seem to be any generally useful behavioral
+ distinctions between SUSPEND and FREEZE.
+
+A:
+ Doing SUSPEND when you are asked to do FREEZE is always correct,
+ but it may be unnecessarily slow. If you want your driver to stay simple,
+ slowness may not matter to you. It can always be fixed later.
+
+ For devices like disk it does matter, you do not want to spindown for
+ FREEZE.
+
+Q:
+ After resuming, system is paging heavily, leading to very bad interactivity.
+
+A:
+ Try running::
+
+ cat /proc/[0-9]*/maps | grep / | sed 's:.* /:/:' | sort -u | while read file
+ do
+ test -f "$file" && cat "$file" > /dev/null
+ done
+
+ after resume. swapoff -a; swapon -a may also be useful.
+
+Q:
+ What happens to devices during swsusp? They seem to be resumed
+ during system suspend?
+
+A:
+ That's correct. We need to resume them if we want to write image to
+ disk. Whole sequence goes like
+
+ **Suspend part**
+
+ running system, user asks for suspend-to-disk
+
+ user processes are stopped
+
+ suspend(PMSG_FREEZE): devices are frozen so that they don't interfere
+ with state snapshot
+
+ state snapshot: copy of whole used memory is taken with interrupts
+ disabled
+
+ resume(): devices are woken up so that we can write image to swap
+
+ write image to swap
+
+ suspend(PMSG_SUSPEND): suspend devices so that we can power off
+
+ turn the power off
+
+ **Resume part**
+
+ (is actually pretty similar)
+
+ running system, user asks for suspend-to-disk
+
+ user processes are stopped (in common case there are none,
+ but with resume-from-initrd, no one knows)
+
+ read image from disk
+
+ suspend(PMSG_FREEZE): devices are frozen so that they don't interfere
+ with image restoration
+
+ image restoration: rewrite memory with image
+
+ resume(): devices are woken up so that system can continue
+
+ thaw all user processes
+
+Q:
+ What is this 'Encrypt suspend image' for?
+
+A:
+ First of all: it is not a replacement for dm-crypt encrypted swap.
+ It cannot protect your computer while it is suspended. Instead it does
+ protect from leaking sensitive data after resume from suspend.
+
+ Think of the following: you suspend while an application is running
+ that keeps sensitive data in memory. The application itself prevents
+ the data from being swapped out. Suspend, however, must write these
+ data to swap to be able to resume later on. Without suspend encryption
+ your sensitive data are then stored in plaintext on disk. This means
+ that after resume your sensitive data are accessible to all
+ applications having direct access to the swap device which was used
+ for suspend. If you don't need swap after resume these data can remain
+ on disk virtually forever. Thus it can happen that your system gets
+ broken in weeks later and sensitive data which you thought were
+ encrypted and protected are retrieved and stolen from the swap device.
+ To prevent this situation you should use 'Encrypt suspend image'.
+
+ During suspend a temporary key is created and this key is used to
+ encrypt the data written to disk. When, during resume, the data was
+ read back into memory the temporary key is destroyed which simply
+ means that all data written to disk during suspend are then
+ inaccessible so they can't be stolen later on. The only thing that
+ you must then take care of is that you call 'mkswap' for the swap
+ partition used for suspend as early as possible during regular
+ boot. This asserts that any temporary key from an oopsed suspend or
+ from a failed or aborted resume is erased from the swap device.
+
+ As a rule of thumb use encrypted swap to protect your data while your
+ system is shut down or suspended. Additionally use the encrypted
+ suspend image to prevent sensitive data from being stolen after
+ resume.
+
+Q:
+ Can I suspend to a swap file?
+
+A:
+ Generally, yes, you can. However, it requires you to use the "resume=" and
+ "resume_offset=" kernel command line parameters, so the resume from a swap
+ file cannot be initiated from an initrd or initramfs image. See
+ swsusp-and-swap-files.txt for details.
+
+Q:
+ Is there a maximum system RAM size that is supported by swsusp?
+
+A:
+ It should work okay with highmem.
+
+Q:
+ Does swsusp (to disk) use only one swap partition or can it use
+ multiple swap partitions (aggregate them into one logical space)?
+
+A:
+ Only one swap partition, sorry.
+
+Q:
+ If my application(s) causes lots of memory & swap space to be used
+ (over half of the total system RAM), is it correct that it is likely
+ to be useless to try to suspend to disk while that app is running?
+
+A:
+ No, it should work okay, as long as your app does not mlock()
+ it. Just prepare big enough swap partition.
+
+Q:
+ What information is useful for debugging suspend-to-disk problems?
+
+A:
+ Well, last messages on the screen are always useful. If something
+ is broken, it is usually some kernel driver, therefore trying with as
+ little as possible modules loaded helps a lot. I also prefer people to
+ suspend from console, preferably without X running. Booting with
+ init=/bin/bash, then swapon and starting suspend sequence manually
+ usually does the trick. Then it is good idea to try with latest
+ vanilla kernel.
+
+Q:
+ How can distributions ship a swsusp-supporting kernel with modular
+ disk drivers (especially SATA)?
+
+A:
+ Well, it can be done, load the drivers, then do echo into
+ /sys/power/resume file from initrd. Be sure not to mount
+ anything, not even read-only mount, or you are going to lose your
+ data.
+
+Q:
+ How do I make suspend more verbose?
+
+A:
+ If you want to see any non-error kernel messages on the virtual
+ terminal the kernel switches to during suspend, you have to set the
+ kernel console loglevel to at least 4 (KERN_WARNING), for example by
+ doing::
+
+ # save the old loglevel
+ read LOGLEVEL DUMMY < /proc/sys/kernel/printk
+ # set the loglevel so we see the progress bar.
+ # if the level is higher than needed, we leave it alone.
+ if [ $LOGLEVEL -lt 5 ]; then
+ echo 5 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
+ fi
+
+ IMG_SZ=0
+ read IMG_SZ < /sys/power/image_size
+ echo -n disk > /sys/power/state
+ RET=$?
+ #
+ # the logic here is:
+ # if image_size > 0 (without kernel support, IMG_SZ will be zero),
+ # then try again with image_size set to zero.
+ if [ $RET -ne 0 -a $IMG_SZ -ne 0 ]; then # try again with minimal image size
+ echo 0 > /sys/power/image_size
+ echo -n disk > /sys/power/state
+ RET=$?
+ fi
+
+ # restore previous loglevel
+ echo $LOGLEVEL > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
+ exit $RET
+
+Q:
+ Is this true that if I have a mounted filesystem on a USB device and
+ I suspend to disk, I can lose data unless the filesystem has been mounted
+ with "sync"?
+
+A:
+ That's right ... if you disconnect that device, you may lose data.
+ In fact, even with "-o sync" you can lose data if your programs have
+ information in buffers they haven't written out to a disk you disconnect,
+ or if you disconnect before the device finished saving data you wrote.
+
+ Software suspend normally powers down USB controllers, which is equivalent
+ to disconnecting all USB devices attached to your system.
+
+ Your system might well support low-power modes for its USB controllers
+ while the system is asleep, maintaining the connection, using true sleep
+ modes like "suspend-to-RAM" or "standby". (Don't write "disk" to the
+ /sys/power/state file; write "standby" or "mem".) We've not seen any
+ hardware that can use these modes through software suspend, although in
+ theory some systems might support "platform" modes that won't break the
+ USB connections.
+
+ Remember that it's always a bad idea to unplug a disk drive containing a
+ mounted filesystem. That's true even when your system is asleep! The
+ safest thing is to unmount all filesystems on removable media (such USB,
+ Firewire, CompactFlash, MMC, external SATA, or even IDE hotplug bays)
+ before suspending; then remount them after resuming.
+
+ There is a work-around for this problem. For more information, see
+ Documentation/driver-api/usb/persist.rst.
+
+Q:
+ Can I suspend-to-disk using a swap partition under LVM?
+
+A:
+ Yes and No. You can suspend successfully, but the kernel will not be able
+ to resume on its own. You need an initramfs that can recognize the resume
+ situation, activate the logical volume containing the swap volume (but not
+ touch any filesystems!), and eventually call::
+
+ echo -n "$major:$minor" > /sys/power/resume
+
+ where $major and $minor are the respective major and minor device numbers of
+ the swap volume.
+
+ uswsusp works with LVM, too. See http://suspend.sourceforge.net/
+
+Q:
+ I upgraded the kernel from 2.6.15 to 2.6.16. Both kernels were
+ compiled with the similar configuration files. Anyway I found that
+ suspend to disk (and resume) is much slower on 2.6.16 compared to
+ 2.6.15. Any idea for why that might happen or how can I speed it up?
+
+A:
+ This is because the size of the suspend image is now greater than
+ for 2.6.15 (by saving more data we can get more responsive system
+ after resume).
+
+ There's the /sys/power/image_size knob that controls the size of the
+ image. If you set it to 0 (eg. by echo 0 > /sys/power/image_size as
+ root), the 2.6.15 behavior should be restored. If it is still too
+ slow, take a look at suspend.sf.net -- userland suspend is faster and
+ supports LZF compression to speed it up further.