[ltp] Suspend woes and strange hardware quirks

[John Locke]

Hello,

Late last week I installed the new Mandrake 10.1 on my T41. I was
looking forward to getting suspend and hibernation to work, with the
2.6.8.1 kernel.

It does--mostly, for a while. It took a while to get here, though. First
I had to recompile the kernel leaving out APIC support to get it to shut
down properly--specifying "noapic nolapic" in Lilo no longer works.
First time I've compiled a new kernel in years. While I was in there, I
compiled in the ehci-hcd and uhci-hcd drivers, instead of having them
load as modules.

Now suspending and resuming works great--the first time. Sometimes it
works the second time, too, but after a certain amount of time some of
the hardware quits working, and eventually the whole laptop freezes if I
don't reboot first. This is for suspending to RAM as well as suspending
to disk--both modes mostly work.

Here are the three specific hardware problems:

1. USB: I use a USB mouse quite extensively. With the current state of
my system, if the mouse is plugged in when I turn on the machine, it's
not detected (but it does get power). If I remove and reconnect it, it
starts working.

After a resume, it works at first, with no removing/reconnecting. There
is a message in the logs about the usbhid not being safe for resuming.
Even if I modprobe -r usbmouse usbhid before a suspend, then reload the
modules, the mouse works for a while. But as soon as the hardware
problems start, the mouse goes dead--no power, no amount of
unplugging/replugging does anything. The touchpad/trackpoint continue to
work fine.

Should I compile the usbmouse/usbhid modules into the kernel? Or make
ehci-hcd and uhci-hcd modules again, and unload them in the suspend
scripts? Anybody got this working correctly?


2. Alsa quits working: Now this is strange--half the time I do a cold
boot, Alsa loads the sound card driver, I get sound when I log into KDE,
and everything works great. The other half of the time, there seems to
be some delay in loading the sound card driver--the boot logs show no
sound card found. But it's there--it just didn't successfully load
before Alsa restored its mixer settings. So the volume on all the items
are set to zero. Turn up the volumes in the mixer, and I have sound.

After a suspend/resume cycle, sound works immediately, just like USB.
But again, after some amount of time or a second suspend/resume cycle,
all of a sudden sound quits working entirely, and I can't get it to work
at all until I shut down the machine.

I've tried using "alsactl power off" before suspending, and "alsactl
power on", but this doesn't seem to make a difference--the sound system
still dies eventually.


3. Madwifi: I have the IBM a/b/g wireless card, using the CVS version of
a few days ago. Madwifi works great until the mouse dies, after a
suspend/resume cycle. While USB and sound work, Madwifi works. When
sound and my mouse die, Madwifi is still there, appears to be working,
loads and unloads just fine--but can't find any access points.



That's where I am now. I'm thinking of recompiling my kernel to trim out
all the extra stuff I don't need on this laptop, and am hoping somebody
can help me figure out what I can do to resolve these issues--I'd like
USB to work on startup and Alsa to always restore its volume settings...

Oh, yeah: I can usually suspend twice within 10-15 minutes. But after
that, when I suspend the laptop doesn't power down--after pausing for a
few seconds, it powers back up. The logs show that one process didn't
exit: khubd. After another couple attempts, with all the hardware quirks
described above, the entire system becomes unresponsive--the
trackpad/touchpoint stops working, the keyboard quits working, can't get
to a TTY, even the caps lock key doesn't change any of the lights.

Hope somebody can shed some light on any of this...

Thanks,
-- 
John Locke
Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems
http://freelock.com