A modern laptop on which suspend and resume works reliably?

[Ian Smith]

On Fri, 16 May 2008, Rainer Duffner wrote:

 > Vishwanathan S V N schrieb:
 > > Hi!
 > >
 > > I am in the market for a laptop (preferably a Thinkpad or a
 > > lightweight Dell). I am looking for something which is FreeBSD (or
 > > DesktopBSD) compatible. In particular, a machine on which ACPI
 > > suspend and resume work reliably. Any suggestions? Can you please
 > > send me your hardware configuration? 
 > >
 > > I am also interested to know about experiences with wireless,
 > > function keys, and docking stations. 
 > >
 > > Thanks in advance.

 > AFAIK, any modern laptop (Merom or AMD platform) will have to have the 
 > 2nd core deactivated to actually have a chance for a working ACPI.
 > That doesn't mean that ACPI suspend/resume actually works then, though.

Just in time perhaps, suspend/resume not working on SMP machines being
an increasingly significant lack, patches arrived on acpi@ the other day
entitled 'SMP suspend/resume.' :)  It's likely to take a fair while to
test and generalise it, but to quote the author, takawata at init-main.com: 

: Hi, I managed to make suspend and resume work on SMP system.
: The patch following is a bit crude patch, but it begin
: to work on my ThinkPad X61 (core2duo system).
:
: TODO:

(plenty, but it's great to see a good start)

 > Sadly, the same is also true for older chipsets (Centrino), though  
 > there are some IBMs where it actually works.

I'm not sure how suspend/resume is going on the AMD64 platforms, but
most of the single CPU i386 Thinkpads seem to STR with some tweaking,
and tend to be supported by acpi_ibm for function keys, fan control etc.

And we hear that someone is working on suspend to disk (ACPI S4) as a
Google Summer of Code project.  So there's Movement at the Station ..

 > This is not to blame the developers, the situation isn't much better in 
 > Linux-land.
 > In fact, you can get enough reports about various versions of Windows 
 > not correctly waking up from the various sleep-states again, on various 
 > laptops from various vendors ;-)
 > 
 > Old PowerBooks and iBooks were supposedly the platforms with the best 
 > suspend-resume track-record.
 > The new ones are coming close, but they're still not perfect.
 > 
 > Have you thought about a MacBook?

You mean a MacBook Running FreeBSD, or OSX? :)

cheers, Ian