Jim Carter wrote:
On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Davy Durham wrote:My power light is fading in and out on the suspended state.. so I guess it's to ram. Plus, the suspend process is a matter of 5 or 6 seconds and not much disk activity.
Actually, I'm not sure if it's to ram or disk.. how can I tell? Best I know,
klaptop's right-click menu's "Suspend" option. But I would like to know. Is
this running some command line app that I can run manually?
Now there's an interesting question. On my Inspiron 6000, the power light blinks sexily in S4 (suspend to RAM) state, whereas the machine is completely powered off in suspend to disc. Assuming you still have Windows on your machine, for them "suspend" means to RAM whereas "hibernate" means to disc. You could see which lights remain on, if any, after you suspend Windows.
Klaptop may fork a command-line process or may do the mid-level signalling itself. Candidates are "shutdown -z", or if "powersaved" is running, then you get more features if you do "powersave -U" (not -u, which is suspend to RAM). Ultimately both of these will do "echo disk > /sys/power/state" to trigger the actual suspension. (or echo mem, if you want to try it.)Well, the echo didn't work for me so I gave up in that area. powersaved is not running, and shutdown -z gives usage (as if -z isn't a valid flag)
It's "safe" to do the echo command. Note that the UNIX clock doesn't run while the machine is asleep. If I remember correctly, "powersave -U" but not "shutdown -z" saves the UNIX clock in the hardware clock, and reloads it after resuming.
nice to know.. thanks.. and I'd switch to lilo, but can't figure out how to do that easily in FC3 (I'm brand new to redhat.. used mdk for years tho)Being ignorant here of exactly how the linux's bootstraping and kernel loading
works I do think initrd is being used. I see both:
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.12-rc2-mm3.img
and
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-rc2-mm3 ...
entries in /etc/grub.conf (which is being used)
Yes, that's them. Grub stage 2 uses BIOS reading (slow) to copy both of those into memory. The kernel initializes a zillion things including all the drivers that are hardwired. Then as the third-to-last step, it decompresses the initrd, mounts it, and executes "linuxrc", which does whatever it does: in most cases, just loads a few key modules, but for SuSE the installer and the rescue system are in two big bloated initrd images.
When linuxrc exits the initrd is freed, the root filesystem is mounted, and
init is exec'd. Then the boot scripts start running, after which you can do useful work.
When would I see this "resume failed..." message?
Just before the initrd steps, on a normal (non-resume) boot. The message is kind of lame; of course it's going to fail because there's no resume image in the swap area, on a normal boot. Since the messages fly by very fast, look in /var/log/boot.msg or /var/log/boot.omsg, after booting. Assuming you were able to boot.
I do not see this in log or at startup. oh well
Well, this is a laptop here.. Um.. cdrom is /dev/hdc and 80gig HDD
(PATA?/SATA? see above) is /dev/sda
OK, the ATAPI patches are _not_ engaged, otherwise ata_piix would have attached the CD as /dev/sr0. And ata_piix _is_ talking SATA to the primary drive. Without the patch it is not possible to do DMA on your CD drive, which precludes using the burner feature (if any).
That's okay, I'm not trying to fry that fish right now.
Nasty consequence: when the kernel tries to read the resume image from your primary disc, it has no driver. So it prints an error code ultimately meaning "no such device" and continues with normal booting, specifically doing the initrd.Apparently not doing suspend-to-disk right now I guess this is moot.. but I'm going to try hibernate instead to see if there's any difference.
Pavel Machek, starting in kernel 2.6.11.something, put in a feature where (after loading the needed drivers) you could set the device number of the swap partition, then echo resume > /sys/power/state. In SuSE 9.3 the initrd finishes with this magic incantation. In checking out SuSE 9.3 last night I wasn't able to get to that step, but I'm virtually certain that it will work well.I wish I could figure out where to get SuSE 9.3 without forking out $100.. I might be willing to if I knew 9.3 would work for me. I guess I could try the live disc, but dunno if the boxed set would work even if the live disc did. FTP installs are fine for me with 4Mx2M internet connection.
Seeing that the HDD light is stuck on after resuming in 2.6.11, I think it's
not an ATAPI issue, but the HDD's driver. On 2.6.12 I don't know what is
failing becauase it just immediately reboots after trying to resume..
Maybe we should be sure that it's suspending to disc, not to RAM. The symptom is very reminiscent of a suspend2ram screwup.
It's not.. so I'm about to try that.
Also, I'm getting a few other replies talking about a guy working on the SATA driver's support for that as we speak.. I plan to get in touch with him too.
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