[SPARCbook] FAQ suspend topic

[Mike Jacobi]

This is what I just sent to Hugo for inclusion in the SPARCbook FAQ.

-mike

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Hugo,

For your FAQ...

>   What is slice 4 (partition e) on my disk used for?
>
>   It is the save area used when you suspend your SB. It should be the
>   exact same size as the RAM in your SB. When you PAUSE-O (suspend) the
>   SB, the contents of RAM are written to this slice. If you never want
>   to use the suspend feature, this slice can be formatted and used like
>   any other slice of the disk.
>   
>   Solaris v2.6 does not need this slice as it seems to handle suspend
>   differently. I would like to see this confirmed however.

The Solaris 2.6 /etc/init.d/power script is attached.

It runs `pmconfig` which, among other things, searches /etc/power.conf
for a "statefile" entry (system default = ".CPR").  This defines the
statefile (that which used to be stored on slice 4, apparently).  Apparently,
this configures the power-management framework in the kernel.

If the statefile entry doesn't exist in /etc/power.conf the script searches
for a "standard" Sun partition with the largest disk-space free and appends
a "statefile" entry to /etc/power.conf with this partition as the candidate.

I don't know if this has always been the case -- I was thinking that maybe
Tadpole just created the partition and made their own entry in /etc/power.conf.
(For some reason unknown to me -- maybe to decrease the size of partitions
for backups to small tapes??)

Note that on my machine (32MB) the .CPR file from my last suspend was
only 4.8MB.  But the only thing I had running when I suspended was
a fail-safe login to CDE with TWM running and one window.

Please reword in any way you like.

-Mike
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Mike Jacobi               College of Engineering
Computer Systems Analyst  Kansas State University
mike at engg.ksu.edu         785.532.4643