System Management Mode. AFAIK, this is an interface which allows the CPU
to stop (clock goes to 0). A lot of the older 486 laptops used Cyrix 486
chips because they do support SMM. Linus made a statement about this
a while back. There are typically 2 "suspend" modes. One is suspend in
place and the other is suspend to disk. I believe that the latter mode uses
the SMM interface to make the CPU push it's registers (or save state
somehow) and then the CPU saves all the registers and writes them (and the
main memory) to disk. When it starts back up, the BIOS checks a CMOS entry,
loads the info from disk. The first suspend mode simply reduces the CPU's
clock to 0 hz and puts many of the chips in hibernate mode. Theoretically,
chips don't require much power if the clock is set to 0, because there are
no state changes taking place, therefore no heat is dissipated and no energy
is lost.
> Servus,
> Daniel
>
--Perry
-- Perry Harrington Linux rules all OSes. APSoft () email: perry@apsoft.com Think Blue. /\- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu