Suspend drains battery on IBM T42

[George Hartzell]

Fabian Keil writes:
 > Parv <parv at pair.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > in message <20051018104551.0a7e7a45 at localhost>,
 > > wrote Fabian Keil thusly...
 > > >
 > > > KubaTyszko <kuba at lbl.pl> wrote:
 > > > 
 > > > > > Have you tried the suspend to disk?  That's what Windows calls
 > > > > > hibernation.
 > > > > i am afraid that STD does not work under thinkpads and freebsd.
 > > > 
 > > > AFAIK there are ThinkPads out there which support S4BIOS.
 > > > With those laptops and FreeBSD Suspend to Disk should work.
 > > 
 > > I am using T42 (2373-5TU) and have suspend-to-disk currently
 > > disabled in BIOS (i think) & hw.acpi.s4bios is 0.  Given that if i
 > > can turn on suspend-to-disk & hw.acpi.s4bios changes to non-zero,
 > > how do i go about testing it?
 > 
 > You have to create a special partition where the "hibernation file"
 > can be stored.
 > 
 > <http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-4PESMK>
 > 
 > Afterwards you should be able to enter S4BIOS with acpiconf -s S4OS.

When I first got my T42p, I went around-and-around-and-around trying
to get S4BIOS to show up.  I tried creating suspend-to-disk partitions
and files with a couple of different utilities from the IBM site and
from (i think) the bios maker's site (phoenix).  I was never able to
get anything to work, and finally just decided that the machine just
didn't offer S4BIOS.

The readme from IBM site that you reference above does say that T42's
are supported, so I may be ready to take another look at this.

I notice in the readme that hibernation won't work if you're using the
OS2 boot manager, which I take to mean that one must be using the
original IBM MBR code.  I bet that the FreeBSD boot manager will fubar
it too.  I had this problem when I was getting suspend to disk to work
on my Sony Vaio PCG-Z505-something-or-other, and ended up dual booting
with the stock MBR jumping to the "active partition" (freebsd), which
had a copy of grub installed and taking it from there.

Here's a summary of what I figured out when I first got my T42p:

  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mobile/2004-September/004851.html

g.