Shallow Thoughts : tags : suspend

Vaio tips for Debian Squeeze

I switched to the current Debian release, "Squeeze", quite a few months ago on my Sony Vaio laptop. I've found that Squeeze, with its older kernel and good attention to power management (compared to the power management regressions in more recent kernels), gets much better battery life than either Arch Linux or Ubuntu on this machine. I'm using Squeeze as the primary OS at least until the other distros get their kernel power management sorted out.

I did have to solve a couple of minor problems when switching over, though.

Suspend/Resume quirks

The first problem was that my Vaio TX650 would freeze on resuming from suspend -- something that every other Linux distro has handled out of the box on this machine.

The solution turned out to be simple though non-obvious, apparently a problem with controlling power to the display:

sudo pm-suspend --quirk-dpms-on

That wasn't easy to find, but ever since then the machine has been suspending without a single glitch. And it's a true suspend, unlike Ubuntu Natty, which on this machine will use up a full battery if I leave it suspended all day -- Natty uses nearly as much power when suspended as it does running.

Adjusting screen brightness: debugging ACPI

Of course, once I got that sorted out, there were the usual collection of little changes I needed to make. Number one was that it didn't automatically handle brightness adjustment with the Fn-F5 and Fn-F6 keys.

It turned out my previous technique for handling the brightness keys didn't work, because the names of the ACPI events in /etc/acpi/events had changed. Previously, /etc/acpi/events/sony-brightness-down had contained references to the Sony I/O Control, or SPIC:

event=sony/hotkey SPIC 00000001 00000010
action=/etc/acpi/sonybright.sh down

That device didn't exist on Squeeze. To find out what I needed now, I ran acpi-listen and typed the function-key combos in question. That gave me the codes I needed. I changed the sony-brightness-down file to read:

event=video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000
action=/etc/acpi/sonybright.sh down

It's probably a good thing, changing to be less Sony-specific ... but as a user it's one of those niggling annoyances that I have to go chase down every time I upgrade to a new Linux version.

Tags: linux, suspend, acpi, debian, sony, vaio
[ 12:07 Aug 27, 2011    More linux/laptop | permalink to this entry | ]

Desktop Suspend!

My laptop has always been able to sleep (suspend to RAM), one way or another, but I had never managed it on a desktop machine. Every time I tried running something like apm -s, apm -S, echo 3 >/sys/power/state, or Ubuntu's /etc/acpi/sleep.sh, the machine would sleep nicely, then when I resumed it would come up partway then hang, or would simply boot rather than resuming.

Dave was annoyed by it too: his Mac G4 sleeps just fine, but none of his Linux desktops could. And finally he got annoyed enough to spend half a day playing with different options. With what he learned, both he and I now have desktops that can suspend to RAM (his under Debian Sarge, mine under Ubuntu Edgy).

One step was to install hibernate (available as a deb package in both Sarge and Edgy, but distros which don't offer it can probably get it from somewhere on suspend2.net). The hibernate program suspends to disk by default (which is what its parent project, suspend2, is all about) but it can also suspend to RAM, with the following set of arcane arguments:

hibernate -v 4 -F /etc/hibernate/ram.conf

(the -v 4 adds a lot of debugging output; remove it once you have things working).

Though actually, in retrospect I suspect I didn't need to install hibernate at all, and Ubuntu's /etc/acpi/sleep.sh script would have done just as well, once I'd finished the other step:

Fiddle with BIOS options. Most BIOSes have a submenu named something like "Power Management Options", and they're almost always set wrong by default (if you want suspend to work). Which ones are wrong depends on your BIOS, of course. On Dave's old PIII system, the key was to change "Sleep States" to include S3 (S3 is the ACPI suspend-to-RAM state). He also enabled APM sleep, which was disabled by default but which works better with the older Linux kernels he uses under Sarge.

On my much newer AMD64 system, the key was an option to "Run VGABIOS if S3 Resume", which was turned off by default. So I guess it wasn't re-enabling the video when I resumed. (You might think this would mean the machine comes up but doesn't have video, but it's never as simple as that -- the machine came up with its disk light solid red and no network access, so it wasn't just the screen that was futzed.)

Such a simple fix! I should have fiddled with BIOS settings long ago. It's lovely to be able to suspend my machine when I go away for a while. Power consumption as measured on the Kill-a-Watt goes down to 5 watts, versus 3 when the machine is "off" (desktop machines never actually power off, they're always sitting there on standby waiting for you to press the power button) and about 75 watts when the machine is up and running.

Now I just have to tweak the suspend scripts so that it gives me a new desktop background when I resume, since I've been having so much fun with my random wallpaper script.

Later update: Alas, I was too optimistic. Turns out it actually only works about one time out of three. The other two times, it hangs after X comes up, or else it initially reboots instead of resuming. Bummer!

Tags: linux, laptop, suspend, ubuntu
[ 11:07 Apr 12, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

swsusp working, sort of

I got swsusp working on blackbird. Re-reading the kernel documentation with a night's sleep behind me revealed that at the very end of swsusp.txt, there's code for a C program to suspend non-ACPI machines. Worked fine! swsusp in 2.6.7 doesn't quite resume X properly (I had to ctrl-alt-FN back and forth a few times before I saw my X screen) but it's progress, anyway.

Tags: linux, suspend, laptop
[ 21:00 Jun 27, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]