Power Management (PM) is a technique that uses hardware and software to minimize system power consumption. Power Management has been primarily available on mobile computer systems, but it is now available in the desktop computer environment. Since PM state transitions introduce different environments to application programs, it may be necessary for some application programs to know the PM state transitions. For example, since all processes are frozen at the suspend or hibernation states, some processes might want to save data in a file before entering suspend or hibernation. Also, some application programs might need to control PM state transitions.
Although the AIX PM system consists of several components, such as the PM core (kernel extension), PM daemon, PM system calls, and PM commands, all the communication between the PM system and application programs can be done through the PM library. The PM library provides the following functions to PM-aware application programs:
Although a PM-aware application can run on any platform, it will only be beneficial on a platform that supports PM.
For detailed information on the syntax and return codes of each PM library function, see AIX 5L Version 5.1 Technical Reference: Kernel and Subsystems Volume 1.