Intel Rapid Start Being Toyed With For Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 5 July 2013 at 12:08 AM EDT. 14 Comments
HARDWARE
UEFI Linux specialist Matthew Garrett is currently exploring the options for supporting Intel's Rapid Start Technology under Linux.

Rapid Start is an Intel technology aimed at allowing systems to resume from deep sleep in 5~6 seconds. Intel Rapid Start Technology is designed to provide a faster resume time than traditional suspend-and-resume methods, maintain user contexts, and is much more efficient than handling a full shutdown/start-up process.

At a technical level, Intel Rapid Start comes down to the firmware just copying the RAM contents to a special on-disk partition and then during the resume process to put the partition contents back into RAM.

Matthew Garrett has been exploring how to support this under Linux and has been making progress. He now has a kernel patch that might be merged for Linux 3.11 that allows for setting the bits dealing with Intel Rapid Start. Aside from the kernel handling, there's also some user-space implications currently being explored for setting up Rapid Start on Linux desktop systems.

More information on Matthew's Intel Rapid Start for Linux exploration can be found via this blog post.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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