[ltp] Suspend woes and strange hardware quirks

[Brian D. Ropers-Huilman]

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I have basically experienced the same problems on my R50p running
Gentoo. I have gone through the 2.6.6, 2.6.7, and now a 2.6.8
(gentoo-r3) kernel, under both ACPI and APM, but mostly APM. My ACPI
forays have not been good, though I have not had the time to fully
trouble-shoot or document them.

For me, APM behaves much as you describe: it works, the first time for
sure, and then for some time after that. Sometimes my ALSA is hosed,
sometimes my USB is hosed, and sometimes my wireless is hosed, though
not always. In most cases, I can simply restart services or, in some
cases, unload and reload modules to get things functional again without
a reboot. Other times, the system is locked tight and I have to power
cycle. I have been able to do a wake -> sleep -> wake cycle as many as
10 times without problem, then I cannot put it to sleep and wake it up
once for days on end.

I have not been meticulous in documenting my cases so to me it all seems
random, though I am sure there are plenty of log indications and other
patterns I am just to busy to notice.

Where I work many folks use Macs and I even have one issued (a very nice
G4 15" with Gentoo running on Mac OS X). It is very frustrating to me to
watch my co-workers pop open their Macs and almost instantly, literally,
be typing away, while I am waiting for my system to wake up, hoping it
won't lock, which it does 50% of the time. Then I have to scramble to
get everything fixed or, at worst, reboot. Embarrassing.

I recently joined this list and found some good information to get the
radeon driver working under XFree which allows me to finally watch DVDs
full-screen again, though the opengl performance still is under par.
I'll move to xorg-x11 this weekend and might see improvements there.\

Stick with the list, there are lots of great, smarter-than-me, folks
here who are nice enough to help.

John Locke said the following on 2004-09-28 09:54:
| 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,

- --
Brian D. Ropers-Huilman  .::.   Manager   .::.   HPC and Computation
Center for Computation & Technology (CCT)        bropers@cct.lsu.edu
Johnston Hall, Rm. 350                           +1 225.578.3272 (V)
Louisiana State University                       +1 225.578.5362 (F)
Baton Rouge, LA 70803-1900  USA              http://www.cct.lsu.edu/
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