The power management summit [LWN.net]

The power management summit

Posted Jul 20, 2005 19:59 UTC (Wed) by tjw.org (guest, #20716)
Parent article: Kernel Summit 2005: The power management summit

I count myself lucky that my laptop is too old to support APCI.

What was so bad about APM anyway? It sure works nice for me:

1) open lid and push space bar (wakes up)

2) my X session is restored in about 1-2 seconds (even before the disk finishes spinning up)

3) close lid on laptop and the BIOS puts it into APM suspend-to-RAM. The equiv of running the 'apm --suspend' command.

Now compare this to my "modern" APCI desktop machine. Until recently Linux won't even handle suspend-to-RAM (I'm not even sure if it does now). Windows which does support it takes about 30-45 seconds to wake up!

That's progress I guess.

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The power management summit

Posted Jul 26, 2005 16:19 UTC (Tue) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

I tend to agree. I have a old Dell Pentium 133 laptop that suspends to
RAM and restores just fine. Although the battery only lasts a few
minutes away from AC, it is enough to move the machine around, and I use
suspend to RAM rather than powering the machine off since a reboot is so
painful.

My new Dell Latitude D400 has a known-bad ACPI, and no APM. Restore from
suspend to disk fails when it suspended in the docking station, and gets
confused about wireless networking at all times.

Of course, I haven't tried suspend to anything in 6 months. I'll give it
a shot tonight. :)

The power management summit

Posted Jul 31, 2005 2:14 UTC (Sun) by lotso (guest, #31409) [Link]

For those uninitiated with suspend2, it is by far more stable and faster than what's currently available with swsusp which is in mainline. You really have to try it out to check out how cool it is. On my Dell D600, suspend and resume has been flawless since I installed it a few months ago.

it's also quick, resuming from 1.5GB of swap (I have 1.5GB or RAM) takes from powerup to X in 30 seconds.

If you really are having issues with it, I suggest you do what Nigel suggested, subscribe to the suspend2 mailing list and ask. We're all very helpful (as all FLOSS users are).

Also, check out the article on suspend2 on the MyOSS Magazine. It's in Edition 1 of the Magazine.

http://mag.my-opensource.org is the address.

(yeah, the last bit there was promotion of the mag.)