Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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Microsoft tried very hard to make desktop chips behave like mobile phones. I can see why, especially with SSDs, there's absolutely no reason why we should shut down a computer but keep our phones on 24/7 with instant wake.

The problem is that a lot of laptop manufacturers, driver authors, UEFI firmware vendors, and you name it, don't exactly have power savings as a first priority. On some select devices, s2idle works great and it's just like sleep but faster. On many other devices, there are bugs and issues that just break shit.

At this point, I have more faith in a brand new Linux install going to sleep successfully than a Windows install staying the fuck off. It's quite annoying, especially since I know every modern CPU has full support for this and the issues just lie in software elsewhere on the board.

If you've got an SSD, the easiest fix is to switch to S4/hibernation/suspend to disk. You can remap the power button/laptop close handler. You may need to enter your drive encryption key again when you resume (which is probably more secure anyway) but your sleep will work reliably and it'll consume no power at all, unlike S3 sleep.

I have an employer issued Windows laptop. I have it connected to a charger on my desk almost all day. It is very often the case, that I close the lid and after some time it gets hot and the fan gets very loud. I always wonder: "what the fuck is this stupid machine doing?", it can't be an update, because Windows is incapable of doing unattended updates without a restart. After I open the lid the next day nothing seems to have happened. Same with my wife's work laptop. Her laptop is even worse, because sometimes it will play the sound of an incoming e-mail in the middle of the night.

It is entirely bizarre.

This is a decent collection of ideas if you want to dig into your specific case: https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/stop-your-computer-from-randoml...

But yes, the active sleep idea is terrible in windows at the moment.

S4/hibernate - shutdown /h - should still work on machines with S0ix, right?

Same with my wifes old macbook

Corporate AV set to run when not being used?

That sounds plausible. Will have to check what a sibling comment suggested with getting the reason of the wake-up.

Hibernating when you have 32 G of requires more than that for swap. That's not negligible on a 512 G SSD.

And copying 32 G is not instantaneous neither. I bet a fresh boot is faster, defeating a big part of the purpose of suspend for me (part of it is finding my workspace where I left it, sure, but also being able to quickly wake up the laptop).

And 64 G laptops are sold now.

Yup, I stopped using hibernate when I got a laptop with 32GB of ram. It took longer than a cold boot to come back from hibernate.

systemd supports "suspend-then-hibernate" which I think works now.

That said, systemd fucked the hell out of this feature and then the devs started gaslighting people about it[0][1]. That was on top of the fact that their "fix" broke the setting entirely and when you suspended your laptop it would never resume, guaranteeing a reboot and lost data (which ironically was their premise for "fixing" it in the first place). They really tried to get people to believe that a nearly dead battery 8 hours from now was preferable to hibernating after X minutes and resuming with a nearly full battery. On a motherfucking laptop.

Sigh. Just when I was starting to accept systemd they go and do that shit. Words cannot express how pissed I still am from that github thread and them breaking my laptop from a basic ass fucking system fucking mother fucking fucking upgrade. Fuck systemd.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zczdnq/systemctl...

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269

Wow, I was going to say that I'm tired of this systemd trashing. systemd is a very nice piece of software and does not deserve all the hate it gets.

However, this one is pretty bad indeed. Also, respecting this one setting they had does not seem very complex, I'm not convinced by their way of rejecting the request to restore it.

> That's not negligible on a 512 G SSD.

Yes but in 2023 a 1TB SSD is $40.

> And copying 32 G is not instantaneous neither. I bet a fresh boot is faster, defeating a big part of the purpose of suspend for me (part of it is finding my workspace where I left it, sure, but also being able to quickly wake up the laptop).

How much you need to copy should depend on how much you have open, which should relate pretty strongly to how annoying a reboot is.

> Yes but in 2023 a 1TB SSD is $40.

Depends where you're buying it. If it's soldered to the motherboard of the laptop it's going to be a lot more expensive.

Seems like the OS should be able to store only the active working memory and silently discard stuff like disk cache when hibernating, so the hibernate would only be slow if you really had the machine seriously loaded up with work. Maybe if you're doing heavy duty video editing? Or VMs I guess.

I wish I had more trust in laptops to properly handle putting itself into S2 when I close the lid, and then after 30 minutes (or if the battery gets low) go down into S3. But I've seen far too many laptops just fail to properly suspend for whatever reason.

On my aging Windows ThinkPad with 32GB of RAM, my hiberfil.sys is ~12GB, so you would be correct. As for S2 moving to S3, this is similar to how I’ve been using the system for years; close the lid and I get S2 or S3 (haven’t looked to see which one)—if the battery charge hits a certain level, the system moves to S4/hibernates.

They also tried to screw over Linux when standardizing it:

> In 1999, then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates stated in an e-mail that Linux would benefit from ACPI without them having to do work and suggested to make it Windows-only.

My Windows laptop from work loves to have the mouse, keyboard and/or wifi fail to wake up properly if it gets disconnected from its badly-designed power cord, despite constantly making me install the latest drivers.

I remember working on sleep/wake and resume bugs and they can be hairy, especially when a device powers off. Some devices have firmware initialization, hidden state and it's corner cases all the way down.

Did Apple adopt an approach like this more successfully?

Apple has always very tightly controlled what components go on their mobo's, and wrote their OS and application stack with that specific hardware in mind.

I've had a 2017 MBP: it goes to sleep, continues to check email etc, and wakes up the next day with an almost full battery. I don't have any M1 Macbooks but I can imagine they could stay awake and have 90% battery left the next day.

Macs also continue responding to pings and accepting SSH connections on wired Ethernet while sleeping. I've had less luck with inbound SSH over Tailscale, but I can use any other device on the network as a jumphost.

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