[Klug-general] laptops with linux

[MacGyveR]

On Friday 09 November 2007 14:09, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> 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,
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Kent mailing list
> Kent at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/kent

karl, thanks for your input on this matter it was very helpful.

one example which i call hardware suspend features would be vendors such as 
toshiba or ibm using a small partition at the start of the disk so the laptop 
can be suspended at a touch of a button or lid, this is normally configured 
from the bios or a installed utility, in these cases the os will not know 
about this as the bios will handle it all.

Anyway i'm wondering if anyone has had any luck suspending to disk or ram 
which such a laptop. 

It seems to work for me but my display does not appear correctly so you can't 
do much :-)

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