freezing system state

[Walter B. Ligon III]

--------

> > > 
> > > Can anyone point me towards information how I can snapshot the entire
> > > system state to hard drive, and have an option to restore it at boot
> > > time?
> > 
> > Is there any OS that can store the state on the H/d? I would've thought this would be incredibly 
> > difficult, as you'd have to store everything including CPU registers, peripheral state, PCI/AGP/ISA 
> > processor state (??) etc and then do a memory dump (writing to disk, thus altering the system state)... 
> > sounds like something the hardware would have to do...
> > 
> > > If Linux can't do that yet, are there plans for putting support for
> > > suspend state into it?

My Sony VAIO has a standby to disk that does just that.  Writes everything
to the disk then powers down.  When you power back up it restores everything
just like it was.  Works great with Linux, XWindows, applications and
everything.  Sometimes the network even gets through it (but I usually
ifconfig down first).

BTW, this is supported in the BIOS and is OS independent (certainly wasn't
designed for Linux).

Walt

-- 
Dr. Walter B. Ligon III
Associate Professor
ECE Department
Clemson University