Arch Linux

acottrell

Member

Registered: 2013-12-17

Posts: 38

suspend behavior unreliable

I'm in the habit of suspending my (Haswell) Dell desktop between working sessions unless I'll be away from the computer for days. I do this via the "Suspend" item in the Xfce UI or "sudo systemctl suspend", and resume using the Enter key.

For the most part this works fine, but over the last few months I'm finding that after a number of suspend-resume cycles (roughly, between 4 and 10) suspend fails: the screen goes blank but the hard disk is not powered down, and I can't resume. All I can do is a hard power-down and restart. Any ideas on what could be going wrong here? Maybe I should add that I usually update Arch on a weekly basis, and of course reboot whenever there's a kernel update.

Last edited by acottrell (2025-10-01 20:33:29)

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 69,144

Re: suspend behavior unreliable

Can you quantify "few months"?
Can you reboot by frenetically pressing ctrl+alt+del or the https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Keyboa … el_(SysRq) ?
if you downgrade the kernel by a "few months", does the problem stop? (Arch moved to 6.16 early August, so maybe try 6.15.9)

Sidebar: you should not have to sudo "systemctl suspend" unless your session is broken (but then the XFCE UI would rather also not work)

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LuxFerre

Member

Registered: 2010-03-01

Posts: 92

Re: suspend behavior unreliable

If the disk is not powered down there's a good chance the journal will show what's happening ('journalctl -b -1' after reboot). Did you try changing to another TTY when the screen is black? (ctrl alt F4...)
And turning off the monitor then on again does anything? Alt sysrq should also work, if enabled.

I was having a similar issue in the "past few months" that was fixed by disabling the watchdog (somehow the system started waiting for it to stop and it didn't).