I've got it working on a Laptop with an ATI GPU now.
In this Notebook, I got also standby(S1) and hibernate(S3, suspend-to-disk) working in the same configuration.
But standby does not save power since nothing is powered off but just every device which supports some "sleep" mode is sent to sleep and told to awake afterwards, so it's not intented to really cut off power from the GPU or so.
That seems to be the differance of S3, at least on this notebook the HW state of the GPU is gone, and at least here the GPU has to be reinitialized by a power-on-self-test thru the bios, this works nicely and very quickly here.
I use Kernel 2.6.11 on this notebook with the kernel option acpi_sleep=s3_bios
That tells the Linux ACPI code to ask the Video BIOS of the card to do a POST (Power On Self Test) which makes the GPU come to life again when an S3 resume is done and the rest is then done by the X Server.
The POST of the Video BIOS is the same routine which the system BIOS calls when the notebook is turned on to get the display initialized. For example this turns on the backlight of the LCD panel of the notebook.
Now I'm looking for a light notebook which can do suspend-to-RAM too and I guess you might like that feature too and have such notebook, maybe we can help each other :)
I also got standby (S1) working on another Notebook with Nvidia GPU with the Nvidia driver and I've read that the ATI binary-only-drivers should support that too, if you use them, but I used the Opensoure radeon driver which comes with XFree86, but I had to turn-off the HW 3D support in the configuration where S1 and S3 also work.
Nonetheless I can have HW 3D support if I start a second X-Server for the Games and close it again before I send the notebook to an S1 or S3 sleep.
If you are interested, there is now also an experimental Open Source 3D-capable driver for R300-based GPUs like the one of the ATI 9700 series.
If you can install a new kernel (at least 2.6.9, better 2.6.11 or newer) and can try it, please tell me and I could give some tips:
bkaindl (att) ffii.org
I would be very interested to know it this can be gotten to work, (and help you in that matter) thanks!
Unfortunately, I put windows back on at the end of my Christmas holiday so I haven't done anything more with the laptop. I keep meaning to buy Partitionmagic and dual-boot but simply haven't had the time yet. Thanks for the additional tips, though.
-Robert
P.S. I'm still running Linux on my main desktop box, a homebuilt Athlon XP-2600 with 1GB RAM.
2 comments:
Hi,
have you got suspend-to-RAM (ACPI state S3) working under Linux?
Here, somebody said he got it working with 2.6.9 and two configuration settings for the GPU:
http://usefulinc.com/edd/notes/UbuntuOnSonyVaioTRSeries
I've got it working on a Laptop with an ATI GPU now.
In this Notebook, I got also standby(S1) and hibernate(S3, suspend-to-disk) working in the same configuration.
But standby does not save power since nothing is powered off but just every device which supports some "sleep" mode
is sent to sleep and told to awake afterwards, so it's not intented to really cut off power from the GPU or so.
That seems to be the differance of S3, at least on this notebook the HW state of the GPU is gone, and at least here
the GPU has to be reinitialized by a power-on-self-test thru the bios, this works nicely and very quickly here.
I use Kernel 2.6.11 on this notebook with the kernel option
acpi_sleep=s3_bios
That tells the Linux ACPI code to ask the Video BIOS of the card to do a POST (Power On Self Test) which makes the GPU
come to life again when an S3 resume is done and the rest is then done by the X Server.
The POST of the Video BIOS is the same routine which the system BIOS calls when the notebook is turned on to get the display initialized. For example this turns on the backlight of the LCD panel of the notebook.
Now I'm looking for a light notebook which can do suspend-to-RAM too and I guess you might like that feature too and have such notebook, maybe we can help each other :)
I also got standby (S1) working on another Notebook with Nvidia GPU with the Nvidia driver and I've read that the ATI binary-only-drivers should support that too, if you use them, but I used the Opensoure
radeon driver which comes with XFree86, but I had to turn-off the HW 3D support in the configuration where S1 and S3 also work.
Nonetheless I can have HW 3D support if I start a second X-Server for the Games and close it again before I send the notebook to an S1 or S3 sleep.
If you are interested, there is now also an experimental Open Source 3D-capable driver for R300-based GPUs like the one of the ATI 9700 series.
If you can install a new kernel (at least 2.6.9, better 2.6.11 or newer) and can try it, please tell me and I could give some tips:
bkaindl (att) ffii.org
I would be very interested to know it this can be gotten to work, (and help you in that matter) thanks!
Bernhard
Hi Bernhard,
Unfortunately, I put windows back on at the end of my Christmas holiday so I haven't done anything more with the laptop. I keep meaning to buy Partitionmagic and dual-boot but simply haven't had the time yet. Thanks for the additional tips, though.
-Robert
P.S. I'm still running Linux on my main desktop box, a homebuilt Athlon XP-2600 with 1GB RAM.
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