A laptop serious issue.

[zahlberer]

I am owner of a HP ze4900 an have just installed Gentoo Linux in it.

The procedure I took was the following:
0) First I did the base install just as explained in the gentoo handbook.
1) I emerged suspend2-sources instead of gentoo-sources.
2) I emerged gcc-config glibc binutils gcc.
3) I compiled the kernel with cflags "-march=pentium-m -O2 -pipe".
4) I followed most of the Power Management Guide.
5) My computer has no major packages emerged, not even X yet. I only have the splash console.

By now, I am stuck in the hibernate-ram script configuration.

I emerged hibernate-scripts and changed only the verbosity in the common.conf file.

Expecting it to work, I ran hibernate-ram. It did not work. The screen went black and the buttons and lights wore off. It was as if the laptop was turned off. Then, I tried pressing every button but the power one. None brought it back to life. By pressing the power button, though, it was turned on and a cursor in a raw console appeared blinking and were off. The screen was all black. I pressed many buttons expecting it was just an error in the grub display. Nothing worked. I went for hard reset. It made such a noise I thought the computer would never turn on again. By pressing the power button once more, the laptop showed the comforting grub screen. What a relief!

Anyway, I unmerged hibernate-script.

I now think it was a lack of configuration in the many hibernate .conf files. I am not a Linux expert and do not think I can configure those. That seems more difficult to me than configuring ACPI or even the kernel manually, perhaps for the lack of documentation.

So I went to the forum to ask if anyone using this laptop model or similar could tell me how is it I can put that working. Is there any trick, any sticky detail?

I value hibernation much since I use it frequently. I really wish to include that feature. The only modes I want are hibernate to ram and hibernate to disk.

How is it I can put those two working?

Please help me! I have halted the installation until I can configure that.

Please!

[GatoVolador]

OK, first we need some more information. Would you please post the results of "lspci" so we can see what your machine has.

Second, there are a couple of possibilities as to why this is not working. It could be the suspend method or you could be using a module that doesn't like being suspended. To check the method, in the /etc/hibernate directory find the lines in ram.conf and disk.conf that start with "TryMethod" and post these. For example, these lines in my ram.conf looks like:

[zahlberer]

Ok, so these are the ouputs for

lspci:

[zahlberer]

Perhaps it would be helpful if I put the output for hibernate-ram -n. And here it is

[Veldrin]

[nixnut]

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Other Things Gentoo.
Not about getting gentoo installed, but suspend related questions, so moved here.
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[GatoVolador]

One thing I noticed upon re-reading your original post was that the machine seems to turn off. On most machines I've seen when you suspend to RAM you get some kind of flashing status indicator to show that the machine is sleeping. Did you see anything like this? If your laptop does have this type of sleep indicator you should see that when you do hibernate-ram. Does your machine have such an indicator? Did it light up/activate when you slept? I am trying to make sure that the suspend was OK and it's just the resume that's problematic. Usually, that is the case -- suspend works fine, but resuming is where you see problems.

Regards.

[zahlberer]

Yes, I tried again and could see a LED blinking, so the PC was not actually off. I was so afraid of the computer breaking down that I did not even notice in the first time.

About resuming, I have been reading and someone said I had to pass kernel parameters.

Also, there was a post in which I was told to look for modules in the black list.

Again, I am no Linux expert. Then I make the question: does using genkernel (compiling everything) solves this problem?

I also noticed some vbetool utility is missing.

What could the problem be?

Additionally, if I am not abusing, may I ask about hardware sensors? It is just I am afraid to destroy my hardware configuring those incorrectly.

Thanks again.

[GatoVolador]

OK, good, if the light was blinking, in all probability suspending to RAM works fine and some tweaking may be needed to get it to resume properly. This is a good sign, you're half-way there! Also, I wouldn't be too concerned about your computer breaking down. If there's anything on that hard drive that you need, be sure you back it up because file system corruption could happen, but you shouldn't be able to "break" your computer.

With respect to the kernel parameters, I use gentoo-sources with the suspend2 patches and use the swap partition for hibernating and the only parameter I had to add was "resume=/dev/sda5" where /dev/sda5 is my swap partition. I forget exactly what the parameter is if you are using a swap file. Since an image is not written to disk for suspend to RAM, this shouldn't be affecting you right now.

I've only ever used genkernel during an install to get things going, but I don't think it will solve the resume after suspend-to-RAM problem. It will build everything it can as modules, so this may help you with testing. I could be wrong here.

You may or may not need vbetool, it depends on your chipset and graphics card. I've got an ATI X300 and I use neither vbetool nor radeontool. You can always emerge vbetool and enable it in /etc/hibernate/common.conf to see if it makes a difference. I can't tell you the parameters you need to tweak right now because I'm not at my Gentoo machine, but if you look at common.conf and man hibernate.conf, you should be able to find the VbeTool parameter.

Regarding your hardware sensors, don't be worried about destroying your hardware. At the worst you'll get no readings or incorrect readings. emerge lm_sensors, run sensors-detect as root and then make the changes it recommends.

Good luck.

[zahlberer]

Thanks, this is useful.

Indeed suspend to RAM works fine at first, because it does show me a gentoo splash screen before going down. This tweaking is the problem. It does not seem to work properly. At resume, the video does not even turn on, it is always black. It used the SplashScreen (or similar) option in common.conf but did not get just the result.

About breaking the computer, I hope this can not happen, but the bad feeling about doing a hard reset is really bad. The screen is black, I do not know what is happening.

I tried a kernel parameter to turn the video on, but the result was scary, it seemed as if the video was displaying garbage.

What is vbetool, I did not emerge because it lies masked in the unstable portage branch, which I do not intend to use.

My graphics card is one whose driver is the "i810". Pretty standard.

About lm_sensors, I emerged it and ran sensors-detect. Then I "modprobed" the hardware detection driver and the "eeprom" driver, doing all sensors-detect told me to do. The result of sensors was, though, as if a driver was missing.

My laptop is so rare (I mean, I find no documentation) that I am seriously considering uninstalling Gentoo. I like this OS very much and it would be a pity to do so. I am three steps from getting it cool: lm_sensors, sleep and hibernate. After this I would recompile everything (overnight) and begin installing X, KDE, XGL, etc... The feeling I get is that Gentoo suits better laboratories (in which they have many equal computers) to reduce compilation time, servers or standardised hardware such as the PS3. A different computer such as mine has not enough documentation.

I would remove the last paragraph, though, if those three things could be fixed.

Thanks again.

[GatoVolador]

Hello again,

Sorry for the delayed reply, I've been a bit busy lately.

Anyway, you mention you are using the splash screen. Though it is probably not affecting the suspend/resume, it might be a reasonable idea to disable it and use the simple text interface until you're sure that the resume works. That way there is one less thing that could go wrong.

Though it's never "comfortable" to do a hard reset, you still shouldn't be too worried about it. Probably about the worse that could happen is some (Linux) file system corruption. With most file systems (but not XFS) recovery should not be a problem at all. I've got a Dell, which are notoriously picky, and I had to hard reset it numerous times while I was experimenting to get suspend to RAM going. The only that that happened a couple of times was that the Reiser FS journal had to be replayed. As far as I can tell I didn't lose anything. That said, when you're testing suspend, just be sure you don't have any important files open and you should be OK.

You mentioned that you tried a "kernel parameter to turn the video on". What exactly do you mean by this? I am assuming you used something like "video=0x374" to get a framebuffer. If the framebuffer stuff for your chipset was not set up properly in the kernel, it is quite normal to get garbage like you saw. Out of curiosity, what does the kernel line in your boot loader (GRUB/LILO) look like? If you didn't have a video parameter before, then most likely you're running the normal text console. This should actually simplify things a bit.

One more question: have you rebuilt a kernel with modules instead of everything built into the kernel? Recall we mentioned having to perhaps unload some modules to get the machine to resume successfully? At this phase, you will likely have to do some googling and experimentation to see which module(s) might be problematic for your particular hardware. If you haven't built a modular kernel, you might want to do this.

With respect to lm_sensors, when you say "The result of sensors was, though, as if a driver was missing" what exactly do you mean? Did sensors tell you no sensors were found? According to the lm-sensors web site your SMBus controller is supported, so it should work. Perhaps HP has some special tools for the sensors. Both my Dell and my ThinkPad have the same controller, but they don't work with lm-sensors since they have their own kernel modules/software for the sensors.

Well, I hope that you do have success with Gentoo. It is great when you want the level of control it provides, though admittedly having more control means doing a bit more work as in this case. Once you get it set up, things should be great. One interesting experiment may be getting a Knoppix LiveCD and booting it to see the kernel config and modules it loads for your hardware and if everything works. This way you might get a bit better idea of exactly you need for your laptop to completely work.

Good luck.