Re: [gpm] FC5 troubles: how do acpi, pm-utils, and gnome-power-manager fit together?

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 11:06 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
> I have a new Dell D820 Duo-Core Centrino and I've had a few surprises
> in power management.  I'm using the Nvidia proprietary X driver
> (because I need 3d for statistical models) and it is a nice laptop.
> Compared to the D800, it is much better.  If no network drivers are
> loaded and I am not using a second hard disk in the modular bay, then
> suspend to RAM works "out of the box" on FC5, with no ACPI
> event/actions files configured.  Also, the running-on-battery
> automatic suspend to RAM works, and the system does wake up, video and all.
> 
> I believe that must mean that pm-suspend is being used to suspend the
> laptop, either when I hit FN-Suspend or the suspend action is
> triggered by Gnome.   Is that right?

Well, gnome-power-manager handles the keypress, and asks HAL to
Suspend(). Because you are using FC5, pm-utils is used, and so the
pm-suspend script is called.

> On this particular video card (Quadro), I've not seen the same video
> wakeup problems that I had on the Geforce card.  Once or twice the
> screen  on the D820 stayed black after restarting, but I don't know if
> that was a kernel lock or a video problem.  Since the video does wake
> up sometimes, I think that means it is OK.  I've also noticed that
> pm-utils provides the pm-suspend function, which provides the file
> functions-nvidia, which assumes I'm using the video driver provided
> with X.  The proprietary
> Nvidia driver does not work well with vbetool commands, especially the
> vbetool post command, so while bug-testing I commented that out in
> functions-nvidia.  But the system did suspend and resume before I did
> that, making me think it was an unnecessary change. (On the Dell D800,
> the vbetool post command causes the X server to crash and the screen
> is filled with a white/pink gradient as the system locks up).

Less cool.

> If I put ACPI actions and events scripts in /etc/acpi, as I used to on
> the Dell D800, I get a little more control over which things are
> turned off before suspending.  I started doing this because sometimes
> the system does not suspend or resume, and after a while I noticed
> that the problems happen when certain kernel modules are loaded or
> certain devices are attached.  For example, if the ipw3945 wireless
> device is active, the system can suspend to RAM, but can't wake up. As
> far as I can tell, it is necessary to make REALLY sure all ipw3945
> components are killed or removed before suspend to RAM.

You can do this with pm-utils.

Try editing:

[hughsie hughsie-laptop home]$ cat /etc/pm/config

And add the blacklisted modules to SUSPEND_MODULES

> i can try to configure that in /etc/acpi/actions/sleep.sh and then the
> FN-suspend key combination uses the ACPI script to suspend.  However,
> I can't figure how to make gnome-power-manager use that script. GPM
> seems always to want pm-suspend.  Yes?

Look in hal-system-power-suspend to see the logic in what script gets
used.

> On the D800, pm-hibernate worked without trouble, unlike suspend to
> RAM, which was fraught with trouble (tough to remove all bad modules
> and wake up video dependably).
> On this system, if I run pm-hibernate, the system tries to turn off,
> it writes on the disk a while, and then the screen goes dark but the
> power does not turn off.  The power light stays on, but nothing
> happens.  So there's something at the very last minute that fails in
> the hibernation.

Smeels like a kernel problem to me. No error messages?

> So maybe I should work on customizing some ACPI script for that?
> 
> ps.  While testing, I've added the kernel option agp=off and I've
> turned on the Nvidia AGP support in xorg.conf.  That was vital on the
> D800 and I just did it here after suspend troubles started to arise.

There's a pm-utils mailing list[1] where we are discussing the next
generation pm-utils replacement.

Note, there is a presentation I'm working on about how pm-utils, g-p-m
and hal fit together, available on my website, hughsie.com -- that might
explain things better.

Richard.

[1] <pm-utils lists freedesktop org