Handling Windows power state

- Rameshkumar Subramanian

While developing CloudStorage Drive [virtual drive] application I came across exploring windows power management to remount the CloudStorage Drive after getting up from hibernate state. Usually you can see our local drive / regular drive, like C:\, gets mounted when the system wakes up from sleep state.

We know that the operating system controls power management across the entire PC system. For example, suppose if you have paused a video and go to the hibernate state the process goes idle here. You can see the video remain on the same state when the system is on back.

The software developers can now make their application power-aware by handling the WM_POWERBROADCAST message provided by the windows operating system and scaling features accordingly. This article describes how to handle the WM_POWERBROADCAST message and also describes the sequence of messages for four typical cases. This is very helpful for whoever wants to re-launch the application after the system get back to power state.

Power States

To the user, the PC is either on or off, and other conditions are not visible. However, the ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) specification defines a number of different power states that are supported by windows operating system.

State	Description
S0/Working	On. The CPU is fully up and running. power conversation is on a per-device basis.
S1 Sleep	Appears off. The CPU is stopped. RAM is refreshed, the system is running in a low power mode.
S2 Sleep	Appears off. The CPU has no power. RAM is refreshed. The system is in a lower mode than S1.
S3 Sleep	Appears off. The CPU has no power. RAM is in slow refresh. The power supply is in a reduced power mode.
S4 Hibernate	Appears off. The hardware is completely off. But system memory has been saved to disk.
S5/Off	Off. The hardware is completely off. The operating system has shut down, nothing has been saved. Requires a complete reboot to return to the working state.

The power management functions and messages retrieve the system power status and notify applications of power management events. The windows offer WM_POWERBROADCAST message which will be send to the application to indicate power changes. The documentation for each of these is provided as:

Event	Meaning
PBT_APMBATTERY LOW	Battery power is low.
PBT_APMOEMEVENT	OEM-defined event occurred.
PBT_APMPOWERSTATUSCHANGE	Power status has changed.
PBT_APMQUERYSUSPEND	Request for permission to suspend.
PBT_APMQUERYSUSPENDFAILED	Suspension request denied.
PBT_APMRESUMEAUTOMATIC	Operation resuming automatically after event.
PBT_APMRESUMECRITICAL	Operation resuming after critical suspension.
PBT_APMRESUMESUSPEND	Operation resuming after suspension.
PBT_APMSUSPEND	System is suspending operation.

The window proc receives the entire event which we can easily implement as shown below. In .Net you have to using interop service namespace for those things .

protected override void WndProc(ref Message m)

{

    base.WndProc(ref m);

    switch (m.Msg)

    {

    case WM_POWERBROADCAST:

    {

     switch (m.WParam.ToInt32())

      {

         case (int)PBT.PBT_APMQUERYSUSPEND:

          . . .

          . . .

      }

     }

    }

}

The above code can be made use to handle the power suspend states like when system goes sleep or to hibernate mode.