11 If you touch anything on disk between suspend and resume...
12 ...kiss your data goodbye.
14 If you do resume from initrd after your filesystems are mounted...
15 ...bye bye root partition.
17 [this is actually same case as above]
19 If you have unsupported ( ) devices using DMA, you may have some
20 problems. If your disk driver does not support suspend... (IDE does),
21 it may cause some problems, too. If you change kernel command line
22 between suspend and resume, it may do something wrong. If you change
23 your hardware while system is suspended... well, it was not good idea;
24 but it will probably only crash.
26 ( ) suspend/resume support is needed to make it safe.
28 If you have any filesystems on USB devices mounted before software suspend,
29 they won't be accessible after resume and you may lose data, as though
30 you have unplugged the USB devices with mounted filesystems on them;
31 see the FAQ below for details. (This is not true for more traditional
32 power states like "standby", which normally don't turn USB off.)
35 You need to append resume=/dev/your_swap_partition to kernel command
36 line or specify it using /sys/power/resume.
39 If using a swapfile you can also specify a resume offset using
40 resume_offset=<number> on the kernel command line or specify it
41 in /sys/power/resume_offset.
43 After preparing then you suspend by::
45 echo shutdown > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
47 - If you feel ACPI works pretty well on your system, you might try::
49 echo platform > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
51 - If you would like to write hibernation image to swap and then suspend
52 to RAM (provided your platform supports it), you can try::
54 echo suspend > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state
56 - If you have SATA disks, you'll need recent kernels with SATA suspend
57 support. For suspend and resume to work, make sure your disk drivers
58 are built into kernel -- not modules. [There's way to make
59 suspend/resume with modular disk drivers, see FAQ, but you probably
62 If you want to limit the suspend image size to N bytes, do::
64 echo N > /sys/power/image_size
66 before suspend (it is limited to around 2/5 of available RAM by default).
68 - The resume process checks for the presence of the resume device,
69 if found, it then checks the contents for the hibernation image signature.
70 If both are found, it resumes the hibernation image.
72 - The resume process may be triggered in two ways:
74 1) During lateinit: If resume=/dev/your_swap_partition is specified on
75 the kernel command line, lateinit runs the resume process. If the
76 resume device has not been probed yet, the resume process fails and
78 2) Manually from an initrd or initramfs: May be run from
79 the init script by using the /sys/power/resume file. It is vital
80 that this be done prior to remounting any filesystems (even as
81 read-only) otherwise data may be corrupted.
83 Article about goals and implementation of Software Suspend for Linux
84 ====================================================================
87 Last revised: 2003-10-20 by Pavel Machek
89 Idea and goals to achieve
90 -------------------------
92 Nowadays it is common in several laptops that they have a suspend button. It
93 saves the state of the machine to a filesystem or to a partition and switches
94 to standby mode. Later resuming the machine the saved state is loaded back to
95 ram and the machine can continue its work. It has two real benefits. First we
96 save ourselves the time machine goes down and later boots up, energy costs
97 are real high when running from batteries. The other gain is that we don't have
98 to interrupt our programs so processes that are calculating something for a long
99 time shouldn't need to be written interruptible.
101 swsusp saves the state of the machine into active swaps and then reboots or
102 powerdowns. You must explicitly specify the swap partition to resume from with
103 `resume=` kernel option. If signature is found it loads and restores saved
104 state. If the option `noresume` is specified as a boot parameter, it skips
105 the resuming. If the option `hibernate=nocompress` is specified as a boot
106 parameter, it saves hibernation image without compression.
108 In the meantime while the system is suspended you should not add/remove any
109 of the hardware, write to the filesystems, etc.
114 There are three different interfaces you can use, /proc/acpi should
117 In a really perfect world::
119 echo 1 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for standby
120 echo 2 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for suspend to ram
121 echo 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for suspend to ram, but with more power conservative
122 echo 4 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for suspend to disk
123 echo 5 > /proc/acpi/sleep # for shutdown unfriendly the system
127 echo 4b > /proc/acpi/sleep # for suspend to disk via s4bios
129 Frequently Asked Questions
130 ==========================
133 well, suspending a server is IMHO a really stupid thing,
134 but... (Diego Zuccato):
137 You bought new UPS for your server. How do you install it without
138 bringing machine down? Suspend to disk, rearrange power cables,
141 You have your server on UPS. Power died, and UPS is indicating 30
142 seconds to failure. What do you do? Suspend to disk.
146 Maybe I'm missing something, but why don't the regular I/O paths work?
149 We do use the regular I/O paths. However we cannot restore the data
150 to its original location as we load it. That would create an
151 inconsistent kernel state which would certainly result in an oops.
152 Instead, we load the image into unused memory and then atomically copy
153 it back to it original location. This implies, of course, a maximum
154 image size of half the amount of memory.
156 There are two solutions to this:
158 * require half of memory to be free during suspend. That way you can
159 read "new" data onto free spots, then cli and copy
161 * assume we had special "polling" ide driver that only uses memory
162 between 0-640KB. That way, I'd have to make sure that 0-640KB is free
163 during suspending, but otherwise it would work...
165 suspend2 shares this fundamental limitation, but does not include user
166 data and disk caches into "used memory" by saving them in
167 advance. That means that the limitation goes away in practice.
170 Does linux support ACPI S4?
173 Yes. That's what echo platform > /sys/power/disk does.
179 suspend2 is 'Software Suspend 2', a forked implementation of
180 suspend-to-disk which is available as separate patches for 2.4 and 2.6
181 kernels from swsusp.sourceforge.net. It includes support for SMP, 4GB
182 highmem and preemption. It also has a extensible architecture that
183 allows for arbitrary transformations on the image (compression,
184 encryption) and arbitrary backends for writing the image (eg to swap
185 or an NFS share[Work In Progress]). Questions regarding suspend2
186 should be sent to the mailing list available through the suspend2
187 website, and not to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. We are working
188 toward merging suspend2 into the mainline kernel.
191 What is the freezing of tasks and why are we using it?
194 The freezing of tasks is a mechanism by which user space processes and some
195 kernel threads are controlled during hibernation or system-wide suspend (on some
196 architectures). See freezing-of-tasks.txt for details.
199 What is the difference between "platform" and "shutdown"?
203 save state in linux, then tell bios to powerdown
206 save state in linux, then tell bios to powerdown and blink
209 "platform" is actually right thing to do where supported, but
210 "shutdown" is most reliable (except on ACPI systems).
213 I do not understand why you have such strong objections to idea of
217 Do selective suspend during runtime power management, that's okay. But
218 it's useless for suspend-to-disk. (And I do not see how you could use
219 it for suspend-to-ram, I hope you do not want that).
221 Lets see, so you suggest to
223 * SUSPEND all but swap device and parents
225 * Write image to disk
226 * SUSPEND swap device and parents
229 Oh no, that does not work, if swap device or its parents uses DMA,
230 you've corrupted data. You'd have to do
232 * SUSPEND all but swap device and parents
233 * FREEZE swap device and parents
235 * UNFREEZE swap device and parents
237 * SUSPEND swap device and parents
239 Which means that you still need that FREEZE state, and you get more
240 complicated code. (And I have not yet introduce details like system
244 There don't seem to be any generally useful behavioral
245 distinctions between SUSPEND and FREEZE.
248 Doing SUSPEND when you are asked to do FREEZE is always correct,
249 but it may be unnecessarily slow. If you want your driver to stay simple,
250 slowness may not matter to you. It can always be fixed later.
252 For devices like disk it does matter, you do not want to spindown for
256 After resuming, system is paging heavily, leading to very bad interactivity.
261 cat /proc/[0-9]*/maps | grep / | sed 's:.* /:/:' | sort -u | while read file
263 test -f "$file" && cat "$file" > /dev/null
266 after resume. swapoff -a; swapon -a may also be useful.
269 What happens to devices during swsusp? They seem to be resumed
270 during system suspend?
273 That's correct. We need to resume them if we want to write image to
274 disk. Whole sequence goes like
278 running system, user asks for suspend-to-disk
280 user processes are stopped
282 suspend(PMSG_FREEZE): devices are frozen so that they don't interfere
285 state snapshot: copy of whole used memory is taken with interrupts disabled
287 resume(): devices are woken up so that we can write image to swap
291 suspend(PMSG_SUSPEND): suspend devices so that we can power off
297 (is actually pretty similar)
299 running system, user asks for suspend-to-disk
301 user processes are stopped (in common case there are none,
302 but with resume-from-initrd, no one knows)
306 suspend(PMSG_FREEZE): devices are frozen so that they don't interfere
307 with image restoration
309 image restoration: rewrite memory with image
311 resume(): devices are woken up so that system can continue
313 thaw all user processes
316 What is this 'Encrypt suspend image' for?
319 First of all: it is not a replacement for dm-crypt encrypted swap.
320 It cannot protect your computer while it is suspended. Instead it does
321 protect from leaking sensitive data after resume from suspend.
323 Think of the following: you suspend while an application is running
324 that keeps sensitive data in memory. The application itself prevents
325 the data from being swapped out. Suspend, however, must write these
326 data to swap to be able to resume later on. Without suspend encryption
327 your sensitive data are then stored in plaintext on disk. This means
328 that after resume your sensitive data are accessible to all
329 applications having direct access to the swap device which was used
330 for suspend. If you don't need swap after resume these data can remain
331 on disk virtually forever. Thus it can happen that your system gets
332 broken in weeks later and sensitive data which you thought were
333 encrypted and protected are retrieved and stolen from the swap device.
334 To prevent this situation you should use 'Encrypt suspend image'.
336 During suspend a temporary key is created and this key is used to
337 encrypt the data written to disk. When, during resume, the data was
338 read back into memory the temporary key is destroyed which simply
339 means that all data written to disk during suspend are then
340 inaccessible so they can't be stolen later on. The only thing that
341 you must then take care of is that you call 'mkswap' for the swap
342 partition used for suspend as early as possible during regular
343 boot. This asserts that any temporary key from an oopsed suspend or
344 from a failed or aborted resume is erased from the swap device.
346 As a rule of thumb use encrypted swap to protect your data while your
347 system is shut down or suspended. Additionally use the encrypted
348 suspend image to prevent sensitive data from being stolen after
352 Can I suspend to a swap file?
355 Generally, yes, you can. However, it requires you to use the "resume=" and
356 "resume_offset=" kernel command line parameters, so the resume from a swap file
357 cannot be initiated from an initrd or initramfs image. See
358 swsusp-and-swap-files.txt for details.
361 Is there a maximum system RAM size that is supported by swsusp?
364 It should work okay with highmem.
367 Does swsusp (to disk) use only one swap partition or can it use
368 multiple swap partitions (aggregate them into one logical space)?
371 Only one swap partition, sorry.
374 If my application(s) causes lots of memory & swap space to be used
375 (over half of the total system RAM), is it correct that it is likely
376 to be useless to try to suspend to disk while that app is running?
379 No, it should work okay, as long as your app does not mlock()
380 it. Just prepare big enough swap partition.
383 What information is useful for debugging suspend-to-disk problems?
386 Well, last messages on the screen are always useful. If something
387 is broken, it is usually some kernel driver, therefore trying with as
388 little as possible modules loaded helps a lot. I also prefer people to
389 suspend from console, preferably without X running. Booting with
390 init=/bin/bash, then swapon and starting suspend sequence manually
391 usually does the trick. Then it is good idea to try with latest
395 How can distributions ship a swsusp-supporting kernel with modular
396 disk drivers (especially SATA)?
399 Well, it can be done, load the drivers, then do echo into
400 /sys/power/resume file from initrd. Be sure not to mount
401 anything, not even read-only mount, or you are going to lose your
405 How do I make suspend more verbose?
408 If you want to see any non-error kernel messages on the virtual
409 terminal the kernel switches to during suspend, you have to set the
410 kernel console loglevel to at least 4 (KERN_WARNING), for example by
413 # save the old loglevel
414 read LOGLEVEL DUMMY < /proc/sys/kernel/printk
415 # set the loglevel so we see the progress bar.
416 # if the level is higher than needed, we leave it alone.
417 if [ $LOGLEVEL -lt 5 ]; then
418 echo 5 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
422 read IMG_SZ < /sys/power/image_size
423 echo -n disk > /sys/power/state
427 # if image_size > 0 (without kernel support, IMG_SZ will be zero),
428 # then try again with image_size set to zero.
429 if [ $RET -ne 0 -a $IMG_SZ -ne 0 ]; then # try again with minimal image size
430 echo 0 > /sys/power/image_size
431 echo -n disk > /sys/power/state
435 # restore previous loglevel
436 echo $LOGLEVEL > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
440 Is this true that if I have a mounted filesystem on a USB device and
441 I suspend to disk, I can lose data unless the filesystem has been mounted
445 That's right ... if you disconnect that device, you may lose data.
446 In fact, even with "-o sync" you can lose data if your programs have
447 information in buffers they haven't written out to a disk you disconnect,
448 or if you disconnect before the device finished saving data you wrote.
450 Software suspend normally powers down USB controllers, which is equivalent
451 to disconnecting all USB devices attached to your system.
453 Your system might well support low-power modes for its USB controllers
454 while the system is asleep, maintaining the connection, using true sleep
455 modes like "suspend-to-RAM" or "standby". (Don't write "disk" to the
456 /sys/power/state file; write "standby" or "mem".) We've not seen any
457 hardware that can use these modes through software suspend, although in
458 theory some systems might support "platform" modes that won't break the
461 Remember that it's always a bad idea to unplug a disk drive containing a
462 mounted filesystem. That's true even when your system is asleep! The
463 safest thing is to unmount all filesystems on removable media (such USB,
464 Firewire, CompactFlash, MMC, external SATA, or even IDE hotplug bays)
465 before suspending; then remount them after resuming.
467 There is a work-around for this problem. For more information, see
468 Documentation/driver-api/usb/persist.rst.
471 Can I suspend-to-disk using a swap partition under LVM?
474 Yes and No. You can suspend successfully, but the kernel will not be able
475 to resume on its own. You need an initramfs that can recognize the resume
476 situation, activate the logical volume containing the swap volume (but not
477 touch any filesystems!), and eventually call::
479 echo -n "$major:$minor" > /sys/power/resume
481 where $major and $minor are the respective major and minor device numbers of
484 uswsusp works with LVM, too. See http://suspend.sourceforge.net/
487 I upgraded the kernel from 2.6.15 to 2.6.16. Both kernels were
488 compiled with the similar configuration files. Anyway I found that
489 suspend to disk (and resume) is much slower on 2.6.16 compared to
490 2.6.15. Any idea for why that might happen or how can I speed it up?
493 This is because the size of the suspend image is now greater than
494 for 2.6.15 (by saving more data we can get more responsive system
497 There's the /sys/power/image_size knob that controls the size of the
498 image. If you set it to 0 (eg. by echo 0 > /sys/power/image_size as
499 root), the 2.6.15 behavior should be restored. If it is still too
500 slow, take a look at suspend.sf.net -- userland suspend is faster and
501 supports LZF compression to speed it up further.