Google Chrome OS may soon be able to go into hibernation, in order to guarantee greater energy savings than regular standby: in fact it seems that the arrival of the feature is certain, since Google itself has illustrated in detail how it will work (the complete documentation, rather technical, can be found by following the SOURCE link at the bottom of the article).
It remains of course to understand how long it will take for its distribution, but according to colleagues at 9to5google , the wait won’t be very long. The tests have already begun, and it is reasonable to expect that they will last at least a few months.
When a computer is not turned on and active, in the current scenario there are three main power states available: completely off, standby and hibernation. Simplifying a lot, the main difference between one state and another is how much energy they consume and how long it takes to get active again.
A simple standby, or sleep, keeps the processor (at least partially) and RAM active, so that as soon as the system wakes up, the user can pick up exactly where he left off.
By switching off, however, the whole system is completely deactivated, the contents of the RAM are lost and when it is switched on again it starts from scratch.
Hibernation is a state, let’s say halfway: even the RAM is turned off, but its contents are saved on the hard disk in a “hibernation file”. When the system powers up, the contents of the hibernation file are reloaded into RAM and the user can pick up where they left off.
As you can imagine, the computer consumes more energy on standby, but guarantees an almost immediate wake-up and allows you to pick up where you left off previously. When a computer is hibernating it consumes almost zero, as if it were turned off; the disadvantage is that it takes longer than a regular shut down because all the contents of the RAM must be written to disk (and encrypted, in this specific case), but it allows you to continue from where you left off as with sleep.
The peculiarity of the protocol developed by Google for Chrome OS, which is called Hiberman, is that essentially the contents of the RAM are encrypted before being saved in the hibernation file. It’s an extra security measure that will probably sound superfluous to most home users, but it’s good to remember that Chromebooks are particularly popular in corporate and school environments, where there is much more attention to privacy and the data being processed is potentially more sensitive.
Among other things, Google also specifies that if a system has been hibernated, it is awakened and another user authenticates to the device, the previous session is deleted – again for easily understood security reasons.
It is currently unclear how Google will choose to implement the interface to hibernate the system; it is easy that, as in other operating systems, there will be a dedicated item in the shutdown menu. One detail Google is proving rather confident about is the speed with which Hiberman will complete the extra content transfer operations between the internal drive and RAM.