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US 7,584,374 B2Granted
Driver/variable cache and batch reading system and method for fast resume
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsXiaogang Gu, Vincent J. Zimmer, Michael A. Rothman, Yuanyuan Xing
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
In some embodiments, the invention involves a system and method for fast resume from sleep mode. Reserved cache memory is used to store drivers and configuration variables. Upon resume, the drivers and configuration are read from the ACPI reserved cache memory and executed in memory rather than read from slower flash or CMOS memory. Other embodiments are described and claimed.
Claims14
A system comprising:
- at least one processor on a platform;
- a chipset coupled to the at least one processor, the chipset to identify when the at least one processor is to be put into a low power state or raised from a low power state to a normal operational state;
- a volatile memory store coupled to the at least one processor to store drivers and configuration data associated with the at least one processor in a portion of the volatile memory, wherein the portion of volatile memory is reserved for firmware use and inaccessible to an operating system on the platform;
- means for shadowing a first stage boot block to the volatile memory at boot time;
- means for shadowing a plurality of drivers and configuration data to the volatile memory store at boot time;
- means for executing the first stage boot block directly from the volatile memory, in response to a request to restore the platform to a normal operational state from a low-power state;
- and
- means for accessing a plurality of drivers and configuration data in the volatile memory store by the first stage boot block, in response to the request to restore the platform to a normal operational state from a low-power state.
5 more elements
A system comprising:
- at least one processor on a platform;
- a chipset coupled to the at least one processor, the chipset to identify when the at least one processor is to be put into a low power state or raised from a low power state to a normal operational state;
- a volatile memory store coupled to the at least one processor to store drivers and configuration data associated with the at least one processor in a portion of the volatile memory, wherein the portion of volatile memory is reserved for firmware use and inaccessible to an operating system on the platform;
- a plurality of signatures, each signature associated with one of a plurality of shadowable drivers, the plurality of signatures encoded in the portion of the volatile memory store at boot time, wherein the plurality of encoded signatures enable access to the plurality of associated drivers and configuration data in the volatile memory store, in response to a request to restore the platform to a normal operational state from a low-power state;
- and
- a firmware first stage boot block configured to run directly from the volatile memory store upon a restore action, wherein the firmware first stage boot block in the volatile memory store is a shadow copy of an original first stage boot block stored in non-volatile storage, the original first stage boot block configured to reload drivers upon restoring the platform to a normal operational state from a low-power state, where the drivers are selectively located in one of non-volatile memory or volatile memory.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.