System fails to suspend: NVIDIA GPU PM error -5 (PreserveVideoMemoryAl

besstsoft@gmail.com · 2026-06-11 05:10:03

Hello everyone,

I'm experiencing an issue with my laptop failing to suspend. I left it on battery power for 15 minutes, and instead of sleeping, the screen froze with kernel panic/errors. This started happening after I enabled early KMS by adding nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm to the MODULES array in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.

Hardware & Setup:

Laptop: ASUS VivoBook 15 X510UF

CPU: Intel Core i5-8250U

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce MX130 (Optimus)

OS/DE: Arch Linux, KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland)

[ 1283.710603] NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations module parameter is set. System Power Management attempted without driver procfs suspend interface. Please refer to the 'Configuring Power Management' section in the driver README.
[ 1283.710620] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: pci_pm_suspend(): nv_pmops_suspend [nvidia] returns -5
[ 1283.712651] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: dpm_run_callback(): pci_pm_suspend returns -5
[ 1283.712670] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: failed to suspend async: error -5
[ 1283.733727] PM: Some devices failed to suspend, or early wake event detected

Has anyone encountered this specific suspend issue after configuring Early KMS? The nvidia-suspend, nvidia-hibernate, and nvidia-resume services are enabled. Any guidance would be appreciated!

seth · 2026-06-11 06:44:24

Please post your complete system journal for the boot:

sudo journalctl -b |  curl -s -H "Accept: application/json, */*" --upload-file - 'https://paste.c-net.org/'

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA … er_suspend
nb.

The wiki wrote:

NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations in the 430-590 series drivers), it enables saving all video memory (given enough space on disk or RAM). With 595+ drivers, it has been succeeded by the NVreg_UseKernelSuspendNotifiers=1

besstsoft@gmail.com · 2026-06-11 13:45:31

seth wrote:

Please post your complete system journal for the boot:

https://paste.c-net.org/ShuttersPlace/

seth · 2026-06-11 15:02:02

The implication was "covering such incident" - the journal doesn't contain a sleep attempt.

чер 11 16:23:27 archlinux kernel: NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  580.159.04  Wed Apr 29 17:32:45 UTC 2026
чер 11 16:23:26 archlinux kernel: Kernel command line: root=PARTUUID=4a94c7ce-f378-4b0d-9ed9-1e026506aa3b zswap.enabled=0 rootflags=subvol=@ rw rootfstype=btrfs quiet splash loglevel=3 usbcore.quirks=13d3:5a07:i acpi_osi="Windows 2015" nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1

If would thus see the userspace services are not enbaled?

besstsoft@gmail.com · 2026-06-17 05:23:15

Thanks for the help earlier! I wanted to post an update because I just ran into a related system freeze during suspend.

I was watching a video on YouTube, stepped away from my laptop for about 30-40 minutes, and when I returned, it was stuck on a black screen. The system was completely unresponsive, and I had to perform a hard reset using the power button.

Here are the exact errors that were printed on the screen (I managed to take a photo):

NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations module parameter is set. System Power Management attempted without driver procfs suspend interface. Please refer to the 'Configuring Power Management Support' section in the driver README.
nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: pci_pm_suspend(): nv_pmops_suspend [nvidia] returns -5
nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: dpm_run_callback(): pci_pm_suspend returns -5
nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: failed to suspend async: error -5
PM: Some devices failed to suspend, or early wake event detected

The strange part is that after the hard reboot, I tried to check the journal for the previous boot to see what happened right before the freeze. I ran:

sudo journalctl -b -1 -k | grep -i "failed to suspend async"

...and the output was completely empty. Nothing about this kernel panic was written to the journal.

Has anyone experienced this specific issue where the NVIDIA suspend process fails like this but doesn't log the error? Any ideas why the journal would be empty in this case?

besstsoft@gmail.com · 2026-06-17 05:27:44

After reading through the wiki link provided, I did some digging into my current setup.

First, I checked /proc/driver/nvidia/params and it turns out PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations is indeed already set to 1 out of the box by Arch Linux.

Regarding the required systemd services (nvidia-suspend.service, nvidia-hibernate.service, and nvidia-resume.service), I'm honestly not 100% sure if they were properly enabled at the time of the freeze. To be absolutely safe and rule this out, I have explicitly enabled them now:

sudo systemctl enable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-resume.service

I'll monitor the system over the next few days to see if ensuring these services are active completely resolves the random black screen issue during suspend. Thanks again for pointing me to that wiki section!

seth · 2026-06-17 17:12:45

...and the output was completely empty.

because

I had to perform a hard reset using the power button.

But I can confirm that the posted log relates to a sleep (probably timeout-scheduled) and fails (most likely) because those services were not running.

Arch Linux

#1 2026-06-11 05:10:03

System fails to suspend: NVIDIA GPU PM error -5 (PreserveVideoMemoryAl

#2 2026-06-11 06:44:24

Re: System fails to suspend: NVIDIA GPU PM error -5 (PreserveVideoMemoryAl

#3 2026-06-11 13:45:31

Re: System fails to suspend: NVIDIA GPU PM error -5 (PreserveVideoMemoryAl

#4 2026-06-11 15:02:02

Re: System fails to suspend: NVIDIA GPU PM error -5 (PreserveVideoMemoryAl

#5 2026-06-17 05:23:15

Re: System fails to suspend: NVIDIA GPU PM error -5 (PreserveVideoMemoryAl

#6 2026-06-17 05:27:44

Re: System fails to suspend: NVIDIA GPU PM error -5 (PreserveVideoMemoryAl

#7 2026-06-17 17:12:45

Re: System fails to suspend: NVIDIA GPU PM error -5 (PreserveVideoMemoryAl

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