[Klug-general] laptops with linux

[Karl Lattimer]

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 13:59 +0000, Paul Littlefield wrote:
> On Friday 09 November 2007 13:29:27 MacGyveR wrote:
> >         Anyone have suspend to ram or disk working on their laptop using
> > the kernel acpi stuff. I'm not talking about any hardware suspend features
> > that a laptop may have just the ones provided by the kernel like where you
> > can use your swap to save the current ram contents to etc..
> 
> I am playing with it... no luck yet.

I've never heard of "hardware suspend features", that's what ACPI is! It
is essentially an interface between the bios and hardware and the
kernel. Controlling ACPI effectively allows you to action control of
individual bits of hardware.

The problem with ACPI can be found in one of my earlier posts, in fact
my favorite kernel joke.

taken from the linux kernel source code arch/i386/kernel/apm.c:1981

/*
 *  Check for clue free BIOS implementations who use
 *  the following QA technique
 *
 *      [ Write BIOS Code ]<------
 *               |                ^
 *      < Does it Compile >----N--
 *               |Y               ^
 *      < Does it Boot Win98 >-N--
 *               |Y
 *           [Ship It]
 *
 *      Phoenix A04  08/24/2000 is known bad (Dell Inspiron 5000e)
 *      Phoenix A07  09/29/2000 is known good (Dell Inspiron 5000)
 */

Most implementations of ACPI are flawed, either in hardware or firmware,
therefore the above applies. 

The most troublesome thing in suspend these days is wifi, most hardware
will work with a recent kernel and distro with plenty of quirks
cataloged, however certain wifi cards have some weird issues, for
instance my atheros card doesn't like suspend at all.

Either way, Linux has gotten better, especially fedora :)

K,