On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Julian Coleman wrote:

> However, I didn't see anything in the (Tadpole) PROM to
> do suspend/resume.  Maybe I've missed something.  If it's not there, then
> the OS has to handle it.

I ran the Millers Simple, Quick and Affordible Office Furniture
pre-installed Solaris 2.5 for a while.  Some observations:

 1.  Sleep on these machines is a joke.  AFAICT it uses almost as much
     power as simply being 'on'.  The hibernation/``save'' feature is the
     only one that's useful in practice.  And, for safety, the OS invoked 
     the ``save'' dump-to-disk routine even when you asked for ``sleep,''
     just in case it dies in its sleep.

 2.  Hibernation in Solaris 2.6 is implemented (almost) entirely by the
     operating system.  It does something creepy, like page-out everything
     and  iterate through the kernel asking every subsystem to save its
     state.  Said state is saved in a <100kB file on the _filesystem_ of
     the disk. If you are Sun, you can apparently hire people whose time
     is worth little enough to write this kind of code for you.  Not 
     that it isn't incredibly snazzy--it just sounds, frighteningly
     time-consuming.  This factlet is based on the Tadpole web page.

 3.  Hibernation on Solaris 2.5 looked like it was more Tadpole-supported, 
     involving a special secondary bootloader, a hibernation partition of 
     the same size as main memory, and a few custom drivers.

It would probably help a lot if not necessarily all, but _one_ of the
following worked:
 PC Card
 serial ports
 internal modem

but FWIW I find just the existing support of the p9100 and the cover
switch/backlight extremely useful in my daily routine.  I'm somewhat
spoiled however in that I have DHCP-able Ethernet at home and all around
campus.  and there is no Ricochet or Wavelan in my neighborhood yet.

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:+1 720 841-8308 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US