Hardware State

Devices that export a reg property are considered to have hardware state that must be saved prior to shutting down the system. A device without the reg property is considered to be stateless. However, this consideration can be overridden by the device driver.

A device with hardware state but no reg property, such as a SCSI driver, must be called to save and restore the state if the driver exports a pm-hardware-state property with the value needs-suspend-resume. Otherwise, the lack of a reg property is taken to mean that the device has no hardware state. For information on device properties, see Chapter 4, Properties.

A device with a reg property and no hardware state can export a pm-hardware-state property with the value no-suspend-resume. Using no-suspend-resume with the pm-hardware-state property keeps the framework from calling the driver to save and restore that state. For more information on power management properties, see the pm-components(9P) man page.