Arch Linux

Sir Sure E. Nuff

Member

Registered: 2014-01-24

Posts: 14

Debugging problems with hibernation

I would like to be able to reliably use hibernation on my laptop, but currently it is a game of luck whether my laptop will make it back from hibernation. Most of the time it either "gets stuck" (black screen) while waking up from hibernation and I have to do a hard reset or it will do that by itself. In both cases, of course, the state that I wanted to preserve by hibernating is lost.

The laptop I use is designed to be used with Linux and most of the functionality (suspending, wifi card, touchpad, ...) worked out of the box. I don't have an idea what the problem with hibernation might be. What is the best way to debug this problem?

olive

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 1,490

Re: Debugging problems with hibernation

You must have a swap partition (not a swap file; this is not entirely true, but using a swap file is more difficult and may require patched kernel); you must specify resume=<swap-partition> to the kernel command line and you must enable the resume hook in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf (put it just before "filesystems" and regenerate the initrd). Other than that debugging is done as usual with systemctl and journalctl.

Now if I understand you correctly it sometimes works, sometimes not. Your swap partition must be big enough to holds the content of memory. There may well be a bug in the process. Probably it get stuck when re-enabling a hardware component but it depends of the precize state of the hardware component. Unless you are a kernel hacker, I don't think there is much you can do...