laptop suspend issues: RedHat 9 vs. Severn 1 and 2

Jay Berkenbilt ejb at ql.org
Sun Sep 28 15:12:25 UTC 2003


I'm looking for some help understanding the differences in
suspend/suspend to disk behavior on my laptop across the last three
releases (including test releases).  I understand that the changes are
almost certainly related to the APM/ACPI changes that have been going
on in these releases, but I don't know whether there are things I can
do at boot time via kernel command line arguments or even do by
recompiling the kernel.  (In other words, are these changes the result
of changes to the kernel code or to the selected options?)  Here are
the details.

I have an HP Omnibook 6100.  Here is a summary of suspend/suspend to
disk with three releases:

RedHat 9: responded properly to suspend to RAM and suspend to disk
  (i.e., keyboard sequences/apm commands to initiate them did what
  they were supposed to).  The system always crashed coming out of
  suspend to RAM, but came out of suspend to disk successfully about
  80% of the time.  Low battery suspend to disk initiated by computer
  worked.  Brightness controls controlled by the Fn key worked
  properly.  If configured in the BIOS, the brightness would drop to
  minimum when on battery and restore to previous setting when power
  was restored.

Severn 1: no APM events worked at all whether initiated by the
  computer or by the user.  Brightness changes configured in BIOS were
  disregarded.  The Fn brightness keys didn't work.  Attempting to
  suspend or suspend to disk had no effect.  System-initiated
  low-battery suspend to disk events were silently disregarded.
  Interestingly, the battery meter still worked.

Severn 2: same as RedHat 9 EXCEPT computer now seems to recover from
  suspend to RAM, but suspend to disk does not work.  Attempt to
  initiate suspend to disk results in suspend to RAM.  I haven't
  determined whether system-initiated suspend to disk works.

Caveat: I just installed a new disk drive coincident with installing
Severn 2.  Although I have followed all steps for setting up a
"hibernation" partition, I haven't tested it reliably because Windows
XP doesn't use it.  I am going to install RedHat 9 again (now that I
have enough disk space to install both) and see whether it works.

<gratuitous-comment>
For what it's worth, I'm temporarily emerging from having given up on
ever having my laptop suspend/resume properly under Linux in hopes of
being able to improve this aspect of Fedora.  I've been using Linux
since 1992 and using it on a laptop since 1994.  My experience has
always been that every new release of whatever I'm running can have
seemingly random effects on APM issues with whatever hardware I have.
This goes back to the days before I was using a distribution when I
built everything from source and upgraded my kernel every few test
releases.
</gratuitous-comment>

I'd be grateful if anyone can shed any light on this or even make some
suggestions as to what I should try.  In the mean time, I'm going to
start digging through documentation and sources to see what kinds of
options are available.

-- 
Jay Berkenbilt <ejb at ql.org>
http://www.ql.org/q/





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