Re: Suspend to disk.
> On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Kieren Diment <ghengis_khan@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I have an old Dell lattitude xpi P100 SD here with Slink installed.
> > Apm is working fine. Apparently there is a suspend to disk facility,
> > as when i press fn-d, i get a bios generated error message, somethiing
> > like "suspend to disk failed". Does anybody know how to get this
> > facility working?
>
> You are probably out of luck as laptop vendors seldom test this feature
> under Linux, so it seldom works.
Um, actually, that usually happens because save to disk needs some sort
of prepared location on disk to put everything... and most people (including
many vendors that preload) don't realize that, so when they install Linux
they don't check the safety of the hibernate partition.
<plug type="cheap">Of course, I know a vendor that *does* take such care,
since I happen to work for them. And Tuxtops offers potato preloads
too. </plug>
As for hardware vendors, I fear more *new* hardware is going to suffer
problems, as MSwin have changed over to ACPI entirely, so there is even
less incentive for them to test APM firmware well. :(
> In any case, the first thing to do is to ensure that your laptop is
> capable of suspend to disk under Windows. You should have sufficient
> instructions for setting that up that came with the laptop.
If you have a Phoenix BIOS (I think so, but not sure of that model) then you
definitely need a hibernation partition; a colleague of mine reverse
engineered the format so we can make 'em without having to load up DOS.
You can get lphdisk at Freshmeat.
The basic point is you need raw partition space of about (your RAM) +
(your video RAM) + (a few meg overhead for the hibernate feature) set
aside... when done, it'll be a partition of type a0 (which linux fdisk
labels "thinkpad hibernate").
> One point of advice: if you get the option of using either a file or a
> partition for the suspend data, I strongly urge you to use the
> partition. That is almost always more reliable.
I agree; not least because the file version usually wants to live on a
FAT filesystem, and the BIOS will want that to be at the front of the disk,
which makes it a real pain in the toot for a mostly installed system.
> Anyway, once it's working under Windows, give it a run under Linux. If
> it works, it does. If not, well, there probably isn't much that can be
> done to fix it, I am afraid.
>
> Daniel
This is also pretty much true - Linux is a great OS, but if your APM BIOS
is truly broken, there isn't a whole lot we can do about that.
* Heather * star@ many places... including Tuxtops!
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