Tuesday 2 June 2009

Suspend/Resume - 100% reliable?

Sometimes "good" is just not good enough. Take Suspend/Resume as an example. Does it work on your laptop? Tried it once and it's OK? How about 300 times? Now is it OK? Does your Wifi now work? :-)

You may think it is insane to do Suspend/Resume 300 times, but that's a good test of reliability. Over the past few months I've been looking at improving the reliability of Suspend/Resume on various netbooks and it is very surprising to see how varied the results are across different platforms.

I've seen Wifi drivers crash while they try and associate during a suspend. I've seen BIOS bugs that cause no end of weirdness. Debugging these issues can be a pain, hence my fellow Ubuntu Kernel Developers have created a wiki page to help debug suspend/resume issues: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingKernelSuspendHibernateResume

Hopefully we can iron out these bugs. My hope is that Suspend/Resume will work correctly each and every time it is used.

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