RISC-V Hibernation Support / Suspend-To-Disk Nears The Linux Kernel

While the open RISC-V processor architecture has proven to be highly successful, one of the features that it hasn't yet supported with the Linux kernel to this point has been system hibernation / suspend-to-resume, but that support is now on the way.

With RISC-V usage to this point being more around developer boards, IoT devices, and other cases where hibernation/suspend-to-disk isn't normally used, it hasn't been much of an issue. But as RISC-V presses more for consumer devices the hibernation/suspend-to-disk is obviously of more importance. Fortunately, RISC-V vendor StarFive has been working on hibernation support for RISC-V 64-bit and published the latest patches they are looking to get mainlined.

Sent out today was the second iteration of StarFive's patches for enabling RISC-V hibernation support for RV64 (no RV32 hibernation support, at least for now) with the necessary kernel support changes. Some changes to the RISC-V kernel code was necessary but then follows the rest of the kernel's hibernation code paths. This suspend-to-disk functionality has been successfully tested with StarFive's VisionFive 2 (VF2) SBC board. ACPI platform mode support is another one of the features not yet wired up.

StarFive VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC

More details on this RISC-V hibernation support for Linux via this patch series.