[SOLVED] My laptop goes to sleep all the time!

[Member einpoklum]

I’ve installed antiX 19.3 recently on a 16-yro (or older) laptop. One issue I’ve been having is that the thing keeps going to sleep! Every 30-45 seconds or so, it goes into sleep mode; and comes back up on a keypress. Naturally this can’t be tolerated… a workaround is to disable ACPI and APM entirely on the grub2 boot line for the kernel:

acpi=off apm=off

. But that’s not a good solution, because it is important for the laptop to go to sleep when unused; and you want fan speed control etc.

I should mention that this did not happen with the Windows XP installation which the laptop used to have. Also, the laptop’s battery is almost dead, so I only run it with mains power plugged in.

What might trigger this “going to sleep”? And – can I fix / work around it in a more robust way?

Here’s the repeating segment of my dmesg during such a cycle:

[Wed May 12 17:11:00 2021] VFS: busy inodes on changed media or resized disk sr0
[Wed May 12 17:11:26 2021] PM: suspend entry (deep)
[Wed May 12 17:11:26 2021] PM: Syncing filesystems ... done.
[Wed May 12 17:11:26 2021] Freezing user space processes ... (elapsed 0.001 seconds) done.
[Wed May 12 17:11:26 2021] OOM killer disabled.
[Wed May 12 17:11:26 2021] Freezing remaining freezable tasks ... (elapsed 0.001 seconds) done.
[Wed May 12 17:11:26 2021] Suspending console(s) (use no_console_suspend to debug)
[Wed May 12 17:11:26 2021] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronizing SCSI cache
[Wed May 12 17:11:26 2021] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Stopping disk
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: EC: interrupt blocked
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: Preparing to enter system sleep state S3
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: EC: event blocked
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: EC: EC stopped
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] PM: Saving platform NVS memory
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] Disabling non-boot CPUs ...
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: Low-level resume complete
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: EC: EC started
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] PM: Restoring platform NVS memory
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: Waking up from system sleep state S3
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: EC: interrupt unblocked
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] usb usb2: root hub lost power or was reset
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] usb usb3: root hub lost power or was reset
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] usb usb4: root hub lost power or was reset
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] 8139too 0000:01:00.0 eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0xC5E1
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Starting disk
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ACPI: EC: event unblocked
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/03:0c:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered out
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/03:45:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered out
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ata2.00: ACPI cmd ef/03:0c:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered out
[Wed May 12 17:11:28 2021] ata2.00: ACPI cmd ef/03:42:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered out
[Wed May 12 17:11:29 2021] usb 3-2: reset full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd
[Wed May 12 17:11:29 2021] firewire_core 0000:01:02.0: rediscovered device fw0
[Wed May 12 17:11:30 2021] OOM killer enabled.
[Wed May 12 17:11:30 2021] Restarting tasks ... done.
[Wed May 12 17:11:30 2021] PM: suspend exit
[Wed May 12 17:11:35 2021] VFS: busy inodes on changed media or resized disk sr0
[Wed May 12 17:12:01 2021] PM: suspend entry (deep)

• This topic was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by einpoklum.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by BobC.

[Member Xecure]

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We could try to see what ACPI events are calling the computer to sleep with
acpi_listen >> acpi_listen.log
After one or two sleep events occur, check what events were the ones calling for sleep. If they are button events, you could disable them in /etc/elogind/logind.conf
For example
#HandleLidSwitch=suspend
should look like
HandleLidSwitch=ignore
to disable the button event.
Suspension will still work if manually called for from the menu (like suspend, reboot, poweroff), but the button event will not trigger them.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member einpoklum]

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@Xecure: When I run that, the log file remains empty after a couple of times going to sleep. No event whatsoever…

[Member Xecure]

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@einpoklum
Try the fix suggested.
HandleLidSwitch=ignore
and reboot.

I am seeing after searching the web for a bit that some old computer BIOS seem to act up with the Linux kernel, giving “wrong” (or problematic) acpi instructions/requests that logind/elogind interprets as suspension events.

I am not proficient enough with acpi to investigate the possible cause, and even less when acpi_listen cannot see any event at all.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member einpoklum]

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@Xecure: Hurray! That seems to work! You guys are awesome.

[Member Xecure]

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This is good news.
If you have time, please hit edit on your first post and change the title to add [SOLVED] so that others who search for similar symptoms can find this posts easier.

Thanks for reporting back.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member einpoklum]

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> If you have time, please hit edit on your first post and change the title to add [SOLVED]

The GUI won’t let me do that. Or maybe I’m missing something.

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