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

[Richard Neill]

Hello Julian,

I have had almost the same problem - apm doesn't wake reliably (it fails 
about 1 time in 10). My Thinkpad is an  A22p, and I've had this problem 
in 5 generations of Mandrake, and also Debian (Knoppix). Even a BIOS 
update yesterday didn't help. I think there is a bug in apm somewhere 
which affects the newer ('A'/'T') thinkpads. My current "solution" is to 
disable automatic suspend; if I really must suspend it, save work first, 
and *hope* it reawakes!

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:

	*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

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


julian underwood wrote:
> 	Hello list... I have a strange problem with my T23 which is running
> Redhat 8.0, I have run all updates except Kernel updates.  What happens
> is the following.  I travel to and from work with my machine, and I put
> it to sleep using the command apm -s.  Then I open the lid to wake up
> the unit when I return home.  I would say one out of 20 times when I
> wake my unit up, the mouse pointer disappears and the unit appears to be
> frozen.  But it's not, because I can alt-tab from window to window (I
> can see the outline of each window change when I press that keystroke.) 
> Also I can see the mouse pointer again--and move it--if I hold the alt
> key down--however I can't click on anything.
> 
> 	What I end up doing is hitting alt-esc (I don't know if this does
> anything in linux) and then press ctrl-alt-del a few times, and finally
> x-windows quits out and I get the login prompt again-- I can then login
> as root and restart or shutdown the machine.
> 
> 	It's kind of annoying; my question is has anyone else had this happen
> to them, and is there an easy way to save myself, and possibly my work
> if this happens?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> JU
> 
> 
>