Hibernate in Ubuntu 8.10
January 19, 2009 2:57 pm GeneralWhen I hibernate my Dell Latitude D420 in Ubuntu, when I restart the computer I go straight into the Grub menu, and when I select the usual menu entry, I get a fresh boot.
Anyone know what I need to do to restore after hibernating? What does the UI look like? I was expecting not to see a boot menu at all, and just boot directly to a locked screen.
January 19th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I think it is normal to have a Grub menu : hibernation is managed by the kernel, and before “unfrozing” some parts of the kernel have first to be restored. So what I would expect is that at some point the kernel would spit a message saying that it is unfrozing stuff/restoring from hiberntation. That is what happens with Tuxonice, and though I don’t known what Ubuntu uses for hibernation, I would expect that it behaves more or less in the same manner.
If your laptop had been just “sleeping” it would be different: the BIOS would handle most (if not all) of the unfrozing and grub would not be loaded (even the BIOS menu does on my laptop, when un-sleeping).
January 19th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
If you mean hibernate as in “suspend to disk”, then you should get a Grub menu during boot but when kernel loads, it should quickly discover that the swap disk contains a hibernation image, and should then switch to locked screen (after lots of console flickering etc. 🙂 . I think you can see some details about this in dmesg output.
If you mean hibernation as in “suspend to RAM”, then you shouldn’t see a reboot or Grub or anything at all (it should switch from black screen to locked screen).
January 19th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Is your swap partition correctly listed in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume? If not, fix it and recreate your initramfs (update-initramfs -u).
January 19th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Check that /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume refers to your actual swap partition. Check if your swap is big enough to contain all memory.
January 19th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Oliver: I’m indeed talking about suspent to disk (usually called hibernate), and not suspend to RAM (usually called Suspend).
The problem is that on boot, no image is found, and I have no feedback in dmesg on why.
January 19th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
How big is your swap? I suspect that your swap partition must be at least as big as your RAM for hibernate to work.
January 19th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Frank and Tobias’ suggestions helped to solve my hibernation issues. Thanks!
January 19th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Check that your swap partition is actually valid (`free -m works to see if you have swap). I had a machine that wouldn’t hibernate because apparently it had been running without a swap for a month due to corruption.
January 19th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Dave, check /var/log/pm-suspend.log
January 20th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
It works for me (albeit it takes a while). What it does is this: Shows you the bootloader and then the normal “Ubuntu” boot image accompanied by a small orange text reading “Waking up”.