Ubuntu Working Towards Intel Rapid Start Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Working Towards Intel Rapid Start Support

With the upcoming Linux 3.11 kernel there is basic support for Intel Rapid Start Technology. Ubuntu developers are already figuring out how to utilize this Rapid Start support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ0NzY

[uwgandalf]

Is intel rapid start in some way or variant used in macbooks?

For those who don't know, recent macbooks (at least the ssd-ones) start out with presumably a S5 standby - and after some timeout, without actually turning on, it writes the memory to some portion on the ssd, after which it still can wake up relatively fast, <10s.

This is not the same as the "older" behaviour which Mac OSX always had, which was a hybrid sort of sleep. i.e. write memory to disk, but go to S3. This can be done in Linux nowadays as well I believe.

[liam]

Is intel rapid start in some way or variant used in macbooks?

For those who don't know, recent macbooks (at least the ssd-ones) start out with presumably a S5 standby - and after some timeout, without actually turning on, it writes the memory to some portion on the ssd, after which it still can wake up relatively fast, <10s.

This is not the same as the "older" behaviour which Mac OSX always had, which was a hybrid sort of sleep. i.e. write memory to disk, but go to S3. This can be done in Linux nowadays as well I believe.

I believe Rapid Start makes use of a dedicated cache device. It's an invisible filesystem that relies mostly on the OS getting out of the way of the firmware (from what I recall of mjg59's post). When you go into standby a timer is set, and, when that timer is up the pc powers up long enough to copy the ram into that device, then the machine is powered down. When you hit the power button the firmware copies the ram data from the cache device into memory and off you go. So, basically, it's hybrid sleep that's implemented into firmware, and there's no "boot" as such.
I'm not sure what you describe above is a thing. S5 shuts the machine down with no state being saved (why would you ever go to this when you could hibernate with s4, perform wol and have a quicker boot), but, according to wikipedia, it can keep a few devices in a wake-on-activation state, but the system, as a whole, would go through a full boot, no saved state.