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posted by LaminatorX on Monday March 24 2014, @04:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the Powwwaaaaahhhhh! dept.

janrinok writes:

From an ARS Technica story:

Linux 3.15, expected to be released in mid-2014, "will feature a large number of ACPI and power management updates" and allow Linux-based computers to suspend and resume faster, Phoronix reported today.

'Visible to users with the Linux 3.15 kernel should be reduced time for system suspend and resuming, thanks to the enabling of more asynchronous threads,' the article said, pointing to a list of changes posted by Rafael Wysocki, an Intel employee who maintains the Linux kernel's core power management code. Basic support for Nvidia's Maxwell architecture is also in the works for Linux 3.15.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by rudolph on Monday March 24 2014, @05:28AM

    by rudolph (324) on Monday March 24 2014, @05:28AM (#20093)

    I just want a kernel that'll resume at all after a suspend. Ever since a warranty-replaced mobo a couple years back every distro/kernel version I've tried never comes back unless I hard shut-off and remove the battery. Even the one (ubuntu 10.04) that worked before the repair. It was enough to drive me back to windows 7.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by danomac on Monday March 24 2014, @06:01AM

      by danomac (979) on Monday March 24 2014, @06:01AM (#20102)
      That sounds to me like they replaced your motherboard with a faulty one, i.e. bad hardware. I have been suspending and resuming for more than five years now with no issues. Well except when they changed something in the kernel and I had to change something in order to wake from a key press.
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Subsentient on Monday March 24 2014, @06:02AM

      by Subsentient (1111) on Monday March 24 2014, @06:02AM (#20104) Homepage Journal

      Hibernation is what I end up using most. Suspend on Linux has always been terrible, and it's hilarious that in 2014 it still is unstable on so many boxes. Thankfully, I usually just leave my towers running, but the netbook sometimes gets hibernated.

      --
      "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday March 24 2014, @12:49PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 24 2014, @12:49PM (#20183)

        Suspend on my Dell E6400 laptop works perfectly. I just close the screen, and open it later and it comes right back after a short pause. It's great. It's a lot better than Windows in fact; I have an E6420 (later generation of same basic laptop) for work loaded with Win7, and this thing takes forever to un-suspend, with lots of screen flickering to boot.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by tchuladdiass on Monday March 24 2014, @03:19PM

          by tchuladdiass (1692) on Monday March 24 2014, @03:19PM (#20280)

          If you want the best of both worlds -- suspend for, say, a couple hours, then go into hibernate (so your battery isn't drained from being suspended for a couple days), take a look at this ask-ubuntu question, and the accepted answer:
          http://askubuntu.com/questions/12383/how-to-go-aut omatically-from-suspend-into-hibernate [askubuntu.com]

          This works by setting an rtc timer event to kick off a couple hours after suspend, to wake up and then go into hibernation.

          Note, that it is highly recommended that you initially set the timeout to something low (such as a few minutes), and try it out with several different system loads, to make sure that hibernate works correctly after suspend. Otherwise, your laptop may come out of suspend, fail to hibernate, and then be left in a powered on state when it is in your laptop bag.

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @11:03PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @11:03PM (#20626)

          my Dell

          Oddly enough, when rudolph mentioned "warranty-replaced mobo", that brand was the first thing that came to my mind.

          I remember a former Dell employee posting at the other site about that company's actions during the days of counterfeit lytics. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [atariage.com]
          He said that when MoBos were returned, they would give those a quick visual inspection and if nothing odd was spotted, they were instructed to ship those out as replacement boards to others who had problems.

          -- gewg_

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @08:54AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @08:54AM (#20138)

      Yeah, nevermind the speed, just make it work reliably in the first place!

      I'll add my little anecdote to the pile. I use Trisquel GNU/Linux. Originally suspend/hibernate wouldn't work. Everything seemed peachy until I tried to resume/thaw. Then I fucked around with quirk parameters and LO AND BEHOLD both started working! However, all things come to an end, a newer version wouldn't no longer work despite my best efforts.

      This clusterfuck is very much related to the horrible driver/firmware situation with the vanilla kernel chock full of binary blobs. Linus, it's time to clean the house.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @10:59PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @10:59PM (#20623)

        Trisquel

        For those who haven't memorized the names of every distro in existence, that is the one that the Free Software Foundation advocates.

        The Trisquel developers make no concessions to brands/chipsets which have only proprietary device drivers available; if your driver is not Free Software (source code available), they won't include your stuff in their build.

        If you go to BuyMore and want to determine how openness-friendly[1] a system is, run Trisquel from your plastic disc / thumbdrive and if everything Just Works(tm), you know that every manufacturer whose stuff was integrated is a supporter of software freedom.

        [1] Another way to say that is "obsolescence-resistant".

        -- gewg_

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by kbahey on Monday March 24 2014, @05:27PM

      by kbahey (1147) on Monday March 24 2014, @05:27PM (#20355) Homepage

      This has to be specific to your hardware.

      We have two laptops running Kubuntu 12.04, and they suspend and resume reliably each and every time. This has been the case for years, and worked on 10.04 as well.

      Nothing special to configure suspend. I hit the power button and the laptop sleeps. I open the lid and it wakes up. Sometimes I need to hit the power button to wake it up if the lid open does not do it. Apart from that little glitch, it works extremely reliably.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by danomac on Monday March 24 2014, @06:08AM

    by danomac (979) on Monday March 24 2014, @06:08AM (#20105)
    I welcome any change to the resume time. While I have never experienced a failure to suspend/resume outside of bad hardware (like a failed power supply) I have always wondered why resume times vary so much on the same hardware. I have had some resumes in four seconds and other resumes in fifteen seconds on my main PC and could never find out why.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by dweezil-n0xad on Monday March 24 2014, @06:21AM

    by dweezil-n0xad (275) on Monday March 24 2014, @06:21AM (#20112)

    I suspend/resume with the current kernels on my gentoo and arch notebooks and it is already very fast. I never have hangs or lock-ups. The only problem I have on my nvidia optimus notebook is that all programs started with the nvidia card are crashed after a resume.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by omoc on Monday March 24 2014, @08:17AM

      by omoc (39) on Monday March 24 2014, @08:17AM (#20132)

      It's fast, I can second that. I close my notebook, ~2 sec its suspended; I open it, ~2 sec and I'm back (archlinux, Sandy-Bridge graphics). Never had any problems with all-Intel systems and I thought this would be normal with other hardware as well in 2014 :P

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday March 24 2014, @12:52PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 24 2014, @12:52PM (#20184)

        This is the same experience I have with my Dell E6400 laptop (all-Intel). I wonder if the people complaining have systems with non-Intel hardware.

        If this makes it even faster, that's great. But resuming in Linux is already much faster on my ~5-6-year-old laptop than on my newer work-issued E6420 with Win7, which takes 2-3 times as long and flashes the screen many times too.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by everdred on Monday March 24 2014, @07:15AM

    by everdred (110) on Monday March 24 2014, @07:15AM (#20121) Journal

    With experience across a handful of distros and a handful of laptops over the years, not one has managed to consistently suspend and resume. In some cases, it'll work for a little while, enough to generate a false sense of security, before it ultimately stops. (Thanks to a kernel update? Who knows?)

    I figured those days would finally be behind me with my latest pairing: a ThinkPad and Debian.

    They're embarrassingly not. It's 2014.

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 24 2014, @12:55PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 24 2014, @12:55PM (#20187)

      Thinkpads aren't all the same. Is yours all-Intel hardware, or something else? I've had very good results with Linux on both Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes, however in all cases I've used Linux Mint (and previously Kubuntu), and had models with all-Intel hardware. While I usually like to support underdogs, in the computer world, I've found that the more Intel hardware you have, the better, for running Linux. The underdogs are apparently too cheap and lazy to bother supporting Linux on their hardware as Intel does.

      • (Score: 2) by everdred on Monday March 24 2014, @02:35PM

        by everdred (110) on Monday March 24 2014, @02:35PM (#20249) Journal

        Yep, it's all Intel — ThinkPad X230 with Advanced-N 6205. I selected the component (and for that matter, the ThinkPad) following the same conventional wisdom you mentioned in your comment.

        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 24 2014, @02:58PM

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 24 2014, @02:58PM (#20264)

          That's interesting, and unfortunate. What distro are you using? Have you tried *Ubuntu or Mint? My laptop is older, however, which is another tactic I use: older hardware seems to have better support since it's been out there longer to have the bugs worked out in software. I have two nearly-identical Dell E6400 laptops (with Intel graphics), one has the Intel 5300 wifi card and the other has the Intel 6250 card.

          • (Score: 2) by everdred on Monday March 24 2014, @07:19PM

            by everdred (110) on Monday March 24 2014, @07:19PM (#20455) Journal

            You know, I may have incorrectly assumed you were asking about wireless card in your initial question about Intel hardware, but I made that assumption because when a suspend fails on this hardware, it results in the wifi indicator light flashing while the computer becomes completely unresponsive, requiring me to hold down the power button to just kill the power. But that does seem to indicate to me that it's wifi-related, and paired with the Debian requirement (at least I think it's Debian-related) that I provide a wireless firmware file during install, it makes we wary about the reliability of wireless in general. In years of buying laptops with Intel wireless and pairing them with Ubuntu, I don't think I've had wifi problems since, like Ubuntu Breezy.

            I'm sure there's a log I should be looking at, or perhaps I'll need to set up remote logging due to the nature of the way it fails, but I haven't been /so/ annoyed by the problem that I've taken the time to seriously look into fixing it. (Nor have I tried a distro aside from Debian Jessie with this hardware.) I just sigh and kill the power the ~15% of the time this happens.

            It's just the opposite of what I expected from these 'brands': Debian + Intel + ThinkPad. (I definitely appreciate your concerned responses, though!)

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by cosurgi on Monday March 24 2014, @09:51PM

      by cosurgi (272) on Monday March 24 2014, @09:51PM (#20589) Journal

      I concur.

      The only really working suspend & resume was on kernel 2.6.29 with TuxOnIce which was more than four years ago, and the PC had uptime above one year, even though power failures happened once or twice per month (I configured automatic hibernation on signal from UPS). The hibernation never failed.

      It was using tux on ice, which is nearly dead by now. I really wonder why Linus refused to incorporate it into the kernel when the main developer was at top creativity. After the refusal he lost his enthusiasm, and his work slowly stopped. Other, different suspend/resume engines were put into the kernel, and they never worked for me. What a pity.

      --
      #
      #\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
      #
    • (Score: 1) by bill_mcgonigle on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:10PM

      by bill_mcgonigle (1105) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:10PM (#20985)

      (Thanks to a kernel update? Who knows?)

      Yes, exactly. For pete's sake, grub2 was a complete rewrite and it still doesn't know how to look at a swap partition for a hibernate signature and boot the matching kernel, or at the very least know what its previous default was.

      Marking P1, CRITICAL, tag: dataloss. Seriously.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Monday March 24 2014, @09:55AM

    by mmcmonster (401) on Monday March 24 2014, @09:55AM (#20145)

    I've been running various versions of the kernel on my Acer Aspire Revo 3700. http://www.amazon.com/Acer-AspireRevo-AR3700-U3002 -Compact-Desktop/dp/B00433SP6G [amazon.com]

    Always the same problem since I got it. Resume from suspend works, but no sound. Kinda sucks since I'm using it as a media PC in the livingroom running OpenELEC (an XBMC distribution). I always update to the latest version hoping it will fix the problem, but no joy. To get sound to work requires a reboot.

    • (Score: 1) by pjbgravely on Monday March 24 2014, @04:10PM

      by pjbgravely (1681) <pjbgravelyNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday March 24 2014, @04:10PM (#20303) Homepage
      Just restart the sound server. There used to be places to put a command that only ran during resume but I haven't dug in a while.
      • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @05:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @05:50PM (#20385)

        Yeah, just reboot the server. Like you do in Windows: problem? reboot the software. God Linux is crap. Just use Windows 7.