Data transfer to a non-volatile storage medium
US6145068A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventor
Key dates
| Filing date | Sep 16, 1997 |
| Grant date | Nov 7, 2000 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Sep 16, 2017 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06F9/4418
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
To improve the speed of transition to the zero-volt suspend state, system context is saved from volatile random access memory to non-volatile memory, such as a hard disk, using a compression algorithm which speeds the transfer of data to non-volatile memory by recognizing data pages having bytes of a single value. The system context in extended memory of RAM consists of a number of system context memory blocks, and between these memory blocks are memory holes containing information which does not require storage. Initially, the entirety of data in a buffer region of RAM is stored directly to disk. Then, successive pages from each system context memory block are transferred to the buffer, where the page size corresponds to the memory management unit page size. When testing locates a region of heterogeneous entries, then a heterogeneous-data flag, the length of the heterogeneous region, and the heterogeneous data region are transferred to the buffer. When testing determines that a page contains bytes of a single value, then a compression flag representing that value is substituted for that page. When a memory hole is reached, a memory hole flag and the size of the memory hole are tra…
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.