[ltp] Strange intermittent problem with T23, RH 8.0--best way to sleep?

[julian underwood]

> 
> My investigations so far lead to:
> 
> 1)The problem is that, somehow, the HDD doesn't wake up. On unsuccessful 
> wakes, you don't hear the start up 'kerchunk', and the system blocks on 
> HDD i/o. The consequences are:

Yes, I forgot to mention that the HDD activity light is solid when this
happens.  Although it doesn't sound like there is any activity.  The
drive is of course spinning however.

I've noticed for some reason, if I put my unit to sleep while running
the latest version of VMWare, it seems to happen _much_ more
frequently--about 1 out of 3 times.  Which is weird.

> 
> 	*Programs still in RAM appear to work - that's why X seems
> 	 partly normal at first.
> 
> 	*Debugging is impossible - something like
>           "apm -s >apmerror.txt 2>&1" never works, because if there is an
> 	error, the system can't write to disk.
> 
> 	*You can do "Alt-SysRq-B" to reboot. But none of the other
> 	sysrq things work properly (it may try to sync, but can't)
> 	
> 2)A good test is this script
> 
> 	#!/bin/bash
> 
> 	for i in `seq 1 100` ; do
>          	echo -e "This is attempt $i"
> 		touch foo	#timestamp of last successful write
>          	sleep 1
>          	apm -s
> 	done

Not sure I fully understand what that does, but I'll

> 
> You'll have to keep pressing 'Fn' every 20 secs. But I would be very 
> surprised if the script gets to the end.
> 
> 
> 3)The only fix I can imagine is to add an SysRq key combination for 
> "wake the hard disk, yes really". But I don't know how to do that.
> (I tried to contact the sysrq maintainers, their email is bouncing - I 
> think that code has been abandoned!)
> I think it would have to be done in the kernel, since there's no 
> filesystem to work with if the hdd isn't alive.
> 
> 4)Does anyone know how to do this? Could it actually just be a config 
> error? Is it a BIOS bug after all? Would the use of ACPI (supposedly 
> planned for Mandrake 9.1) be better  ?
> 
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Richard
> 
>