[GTALUG] thinkpad repair; or, new laptop

[Giles Orr]

On 1 September 2016 at 15:01, Michael Hill via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:52 PM, Matt Price via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>
>> My THinkpad T440s is having some serious issues with suspend -- at times
>> it will enter a hard freeze while suspended, requiring a hard reset with the
>> manual reset button; at times it won't suspend at all, but enter a similarly
>> unresponsive, blank-screen state from which it cannot be accessesd,
>> requiring a soft reset with the power button; and at other times it will
>> suspend just fine.
>
>
> I'm running Fedora Rawhide on my aging ThinkPad SL410. For a few days last
> week I had the same experience with suspend. After a kernel upgrade (from
> one 4.8.0 release candidate to another), suspend started working again.

I'll second the implicit "probably a kernel issue."  I had a year's
worth of problems with suspend on my primary system.  Every time
Ubuntu issued a new kernel, I'd try it, and then revert to a working
kernel that - by the time they fixed the regression - was a year old.
For a while I was running xrandr to switch off the external screen
before I suspended, and then running it again to turn the external
screen back on after resume because I had empirically proven that was
the problem.

As for logging - it seems that logging doesn't happen on a broken
suspend.  I looked everywhere and never had any luck (I had lots of
time to look).  Debugging suspend turns out to be remarkably
nightmarish: the kernel maintainers want you to let the kernel write
to your RTC, because it's the only thing that survives a reboot.  Of
course, it no longer works as a clock.  And you have to retrieve the
data within three minutes or it'll be overwritten.  All on the
off-chance that the data retrieved will tell THEM something - not you.
I didn't follow through on that.

Look at the kernel first by trying old kernels, see if suspend is
stable there.  Then accuse the hardware.  Good luck.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com