[ltp] SuSE 9.1 on T40

[Taylor Smith]

Hey Y'all,

Sorry to be such a newbie, but I'm having a lot of trouble which I don't 
usually have. I recently dumped SuSE 9.0 and put on a clean install of 9.1. 
Immediately I started having trouble. First, I had a major battery drain 
under ACPI Save-to-RAM. (On the order of 70% of the battery per hour). When I 
used ACPI save-to-disk and also save-to-ram, less than half of the time would 
it ever resume. More than half the time, I'd loose my session; it wouldn't 
resume and it gave no errors for it on the screen or any log. So I started 
booting with kernel options "acpi=off apm=on" because I had good luck with 
APM before.

While suspend-to-ram worked beautifully (not even 5% per hour), the whole 
system ran very slow, way slower than just typical CPU freq scaling. I 
couldn't pick out a reason for it, but logging out of KDE would take 5 
minutes. Starting it up was on the order of 15 minutes. The boot process was 
about 10. It could even take 30 seconds to start a bash shell from a text 
terminal, and characters would appear at least 1 to 2 seconds after I typed 
them.

Booting with "apm=off acpi=off" was even slower and the keyboard didn't 
function, again, no mention of anything in the logs. This is enough to make 
me want to boot into windows.

The only thing that sticks out at me from the logs are the following lines:
(/var/log/messages)

Dec 13 19:42:40 linux kernel:  hde: hde1
Dec 13 19:42:40 linux /etc/hotplug/block.agent[30865]: new block 
device /block/hde/hde

HDE is a PCMCIA memory card adapter (module ide_cs) which I keep in the card 
slot at all times, yet this line repeats itself at least once every three 
seconds. I disabled the use of subfs by hotplug, and the system even boots 
with the card inserted. I never had this trouble with SuSE 9, but I can't 
tell if this is related to my troubles or seperate.

Finally, whether the computer is plugged in or unplugged at boot, or while 
running doesn't make a difference in the slow-downs or battery drainages. 
Neither with the pcmcia card. 

My question is how can I get the system running at normal speeds under APM?
(I would prefer APM to ACPI, but if I can make either work perfectly, as it 
did before, I'd be ok with it). I don't think references to this were in the 
archives before, but if this is a repetition, I apologize.

Thanks for your patience,
Taylor Smith

IBM ThinkPad T40, 2373-19U
SuSE 9.1 and Windows XP Pro Dual-boot
linux:/home/tsmith # uname -ripo
2.6.5-7.111-default i686 i386 GNU/Linux