Microsoft to Expand Hibernation for Fast Windows Startups
In a patent application filed with the USPTO, Microsoft says that a general startup would only require a partial startup sequence by copying a hibernation file that is created during a shutdown from non-volatile memory, such as an SSD or HDD, to the volatile memory, such as DRAM, of a computer to enable startup times that are comparable to the wakeup times today. Specifically, the patent application explains a startup that covers:
"conditional processing that may include determining whether a hibernation file exists. If so, a further check may be made on whether it is possible that the target state of the computing device could have changed between the time when the hibernation file was created and the time at which the startup command was received. If events that could have caused a change in state are detected, the computing device may perform a full startup sequence."
The idea is that information can be copied from a hibernation file faster much faster than the software would need to load and configure "tens of thousands" of components at startup.
If It fails miserably, just another MS fail!
It's a pretty cool idea as long as it's robust enough to reboot the kernel when HW changes occur.
Not Windows RT. Windows RT actually doesn't use Hibernate because ARM processors can almost completely shutdown even when the OS is not in a shutdown state. ARM processors can even maintain sound and network streams and shut down all other processing, while the OS is in a "standby" state. Power management on ARM is different from x86.
On x86 processors, Windows 8 already does the hybrid hibernate feature explained in the article. There have been previous software packages from motherboard makers that do this in Windows 7 as well (Asrock Instant Boot, for instance). Now it's patented.
You won't have to wait (long) for this functionality, since it's already in Windows 8, including the pre-release versions.
It doesn't require any special hardware. It's just Hibernate, but Windows does it differently.
No, that doesn't make sense at all. If you are dumping memory contents to a hibernation file, it should be much faster to write that then to load all of the individual files from each place on the drive and process them. If your hibernate is that slow, you should consider running defrag. A typical bootup of Windows 7 still takes at least 30 seconds or more on a conventional hard drive. Dumping a hibernate file to disk should take less than 10 seconds even for a system with up to 4GB of RAM. Your hibernate file will never be more than the actual amount of physical RAM that you have installed.
High-end mechanical hard drives are around 80MB/s, so using that speed to read 4GB (assuming you had 4GB of programs loaded) is still 50 seconds to resume from hibernate.
Even if you have a more reasonable RAM usage of 1GB on a more standard 40MB/s hard drive, you are looking at around just under half a minute to resume.
If you are using a SSD (500MB/s) the time to resume will be quicker with hibernate.
Your figures are way off for hard drives, unless you're talking about 5400RPM laptop drives...
Microsoft already has this capability, that's not what the article is about.
The article is about filing a PATENT so that ONLY Microsoft can use this technology.
That is a bad thing, not a good thing.
More patent trolling by large companies. It seems like it's getting worse.
You're correct, and I'm not clear how this process differs from normal hibernation used now by everybody else.