laptop suspend states behaviour

[Jesse Guardiani]

Cliff L. Biffle wrote:

> On Thursday 26 June 2003 03:10 am, Stijn Hoop wrote:
>> I'm sorry to say that most of the suspend states aren't very useful. Are
>> people able to use any suspend method on other laptops?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> From following this list, it sounds like ACPI in FreeBSD is horribly
> broken on
> the vast majority of modern laptops.  I am fortunate enough not to own
> modern laptops. :-)

That's the impression I get too. I personally can't decide if I think the
problem is with FreeBSD's code, or with manufacturer's failing to follow
spec.

I think it's mostly the manufacturer's fault, but I think FreeBSD's ACPI
and APM efforts are slightly inferior to Linux's on average. That has been _my_
experience anyway. APM works flawlessly under Debian Woody Linux on my
IBM A30p, but requires major user space kludging to work well under FreeBSD
5.1-RELEASE.

It's not enough to make me want to go back to linux though... :) Not even
close.


> 
> On my Toshiba Satellite 1605, ACPI suspend (to RAM and to disk) works
> flawlessly.  It's worth noting that ACPI suspend-to-disk is several times
> faster than APM suspend-to-disk.  This machine now runs Gentoo, however,
> because of the lurking M5237 USB bug (which I've finally gotten offers for
> help on, six months later, but can't have the downtime required to
> reinstall the OS twice to test).
> 
> On my IBM Thinkpad 755CX, APM suspend (to RAM and to disk) also works
> flawlessly, and is much faster than the Satellite since it's maxed out
> with
> 40MB of RAM.  :-)
> 
> I recently picked up an HP Pavilion N5290 (like the other two, it died and
> was discarded by someone who couldn't solder); it's running Gentoo by
> default after my issues with USB on the Satellite, so I can't comment
> there. Hardware suspend doesn't work -at- -all- on it in Linux, but
> software suspend
> in their kernel does.  You just have to manually patch your kernel to do
> it. Whee.

Software suspend would make a pretty neat option for FreeBSD, I think. I bet
we could do it at least as well as those Linux folks too.

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
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