Hibernate, suspend and shutdown for laptops

dollyp · 2014-08-28 18:45:22

I have been experimenting with suspend/hibernate over the last few days. I had assumed that when I set the power manager to hibernate when the battery runs down then I would be protected against data loss. What I have found is that if I am working on the laptop when the battery runs out the laptop will hibernate without warning. That is fine and doing what I want.

BUT if the laptop is suspended and the battery runs down then it just shuts down. Thats really bad!

Am I missing something in xfce power manager? If I set 'power manager> on battery> when battery power is critical' to hibernate, I would expect that the power manager would act on the hibernate instruction even when the laptop is suspended. That is the only way to protect a user's data if the laptop is left a little too long suspended.

I have found a workround and that is to use something called hybrid-suspend. See this link http://daniel.hahler.de/use-hybrid-susp … by-default. What this does is save a hibernate image to swap every time the laptop is suspended. So, if the laptop still has power when opening the lid it will resume from suspend, but if the laptop has shut down it will resume from hibernation automatically. Only con: there is a few extra seconds of disk activity after I close my laptop lid. Ymmv but I've tested it and it works for me.

Can this functionality not be put into place within power manager?

David

Last edited by dollyp (2014-08-28 18:46:53)

ToZ · 2014-08-29 02:02:08

There is an existing request to add hybrid suspend to the power manager. However, since the change is made at the acpi level (as per the article you linked), why not just make that change at the acpi level and let acpi deal with the hybrid suspend. Just leave the xfce4-power-manager set to suspend.

Note however, that the hybrid-suspend method linked in that article only works with systems that still use pm-utils (pm-suspend). Hybrid sleep on systemd is discussed in this arch wiki article.

dollyp · 2014-09-04 16:15:52

Thank you for your reply ToZ (sorry for delay in responding). Useful info about the change coming with systemd - looks rather complicated. Perhaps the point I wanted to make was that other users should not think that 'when battery power is critical - hibernate' means safety as it doesn't. There seems to be a flurry of small changes to xfce power manager (your 'Whats new' posts); perhaps a small change to the wording could be added to indicate that critical power = hibernate only works when you are actually using the machine and not when it is suspended!

Regards
David

MountainDewManiac · 2014-09-04 18:28:38

Well, that makes sense. Every definition of a computer's suspend function that I've read states that it is a low-power state in which basically only the RAM is powered. Perhaps you should be using hibernate. Or, perhaps the user can adjust the point at which the battery charge state is considered critical, thereby ensuring enough remaining charge to last through a (reasonable) suspend. IDK if this is possible, but it should be (IMO).

Regards,
MDM

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#1 2014-08-28 18:45:22

Hibernate, suspend and shutdown for laptops

#2 2014-08-29 02:02:08

Re: Hibernate, suspend and shutdown for laptops

#3 2014-09-04 16:15:52

Re: Hibernate, suspend and shutdown for laptops

#4 2014-09-04 18:28:38

Re: Hibernate, suspend and shutdown for laptops

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