1. A computer system comprising: a system memory shared by a processor and a coprocessor, the system memory comprising a shared portion accessible by the coprocessor and the processor, and further comprising a first application and a second application, the coprocessor comprising: a compression and decompression engine accessed by the first application being executed by the processor and a second application being executed by the processor, the compression and decompression engine comprises: a history first-in-first-out (FIFO) buffer and a hash table utilized to compress data received by the history FIFO buffer from the system memory and a suspend and resume manager that arbitrates first application and second application access to the compression and decompression engine and saves coprocessor state metadata describing the contents of the compression and decompression engine to the system memory when suspending first application access and allowing second application access to the compression and decompression engine; wherein upon suspending first application access to the compression and decompression engine, the suspend and resume manager clears the contents of the history FIFO buffer and writes a target empty bit count (TEBC) to the system memory, the TEBC indicating the quantity of padding bits in the most recent compressed output from the compression and decompression engine.