1 2System Power Management States 3 4 5The kernel supports three power management states generically, though 6each is dependent on platform support code to implement the low-level 7details for each state. This file describes each state, what they are 8commonly called, what ACPI state they map to, and what string to write 9to /sys/power/state to enter that state 10 11 12State: Standby / Power-On Suspend 13ACPI State: S1 14String: "standby" 15 16This state offers minimal, though real, power savings, while providing 17a very low-latency transition back to a working system. No operating 18state is lost (the CPU retains power), so the system easily starts up 19again where it left off. 20 21We try to put devices in a low-power state equivalent to D1, which 22also offers low power savings, but low resume latency. Not all devices 23support D1, and those that don't are left on. 24 25A transition from Standby to the On state should take about 1-2 26seconds. 27 28 29State: Suspend-to-RAM 30ACPI State: S3 31String: "mem" 32 33This state offers significant power savings as everything in the 34system is put into a low-power state, except for memory, which is 35placed in self-refresh mode to retain its contents. 36 37System and device state is saved and kept in memory. All devices are 38suspended and put into D3. In many cases, all peripheral buses lose 39power when entering STR, so devices must be able to handle the 40transition back to the On state. 41 42For at least ACPI, STR requires some minimal boot-strapping code to 43resume the system from STR. This may be true on other platforms. 44 45A transition from Suspend-to-RAM to the On state should take about 463-5 seconds. 47 48 49State: Suspend-to-disk 50ACPI State: S4 51String: "disk" 52 53This state offers the greatest power savings, and can be used even in 54the absence of low-level platform support for power management. This 55state operates similarly to Suspend-to-RAM, but includes a final step 56of writing memory contents to disk. On resume, this is read and memory 57is restored to its pre-suspend state. 58 59STD can be handled by the firmware or the kernel. If it is handled by 60the firmware, it usually requires a dedicated partition that must be 61setup via another operating system for it to use. Despite the 62inconvenience, this method requires minimal work by the kernel, since 63the firmware will also handle restoring memory contents on resume. 64 65For suspend-to-disk, a mechanism called swsusp called 'swsusp' (Swap 66Suspend) is used to write memory contents to free swap space. 67swsusp has some restrictive requirements, but should work in most 68cases. Some, albeit outdated, documentation can be found in 69Documentation/power/swsusp.txt. Alternatively, userspace can do most 70of the actual suspend to disk work, see userland-swsusp.txt. 71 72Once memory state is written to disk, the system may either enter a 73low-power state (like ACPI S4), or it may simply power down. Powering 74down offers greater savings, and allows this mechanism to work on any 75system. However, entering a real low-power state allows the user to 76trigger wake up events (e.g. pressing a key or opening a laptop lid). 77 78A transition from Suspend-to-Disk to the On state should take about 30 79seconds, though it's typically a bit more with the current 80implementation. 81