Vista an Uneasy Sleeper

Emmy King writes "

One thing we just can't wrap our mind about is the terrible, broken, and completely pitiful support for waking Vista up from a Deep Sleep or hibernation.

Anytime you attempt to wake Vista up from Hibernation or "Deep Sleep" (S3-induced sleep mode), it dies. It's either a BSOD, or a driver error, or a broken network, no DWM, lack of sound... the list goes on, and on. So much for an operating system to "power" the future! (No pun intended!) That's with properly-signed drivers and no buggy software on multiple PCs..."

bummer

[yagu]

Each new release, each patch, each service pack I keep waiting for the perfect, all-right-I'll-settle-for-well-behaved advanced power control. I find this unsettling Vista may not deliver. One "feature" I always treasure in Windows systems is its "better" support for power control.

At least Windows with its more cozy relationship with chip and BIOS industry supposedly offers ACPI for fast "sleep" and "rewake" functionality. In fact that was my trick way to get ACPI for linux when it was really important by running a vmware install of linux within a well behaved windows (not always as well behaved as I'd have wished, but better than the problematic ACPI linux support).

And now, out of the gates (sic) Vista may not deliver? That's going to leave a mark. I'd considered getting a machine for educational purposes (since I do support for everyone I know), but I'd considered waiting for some of the initial bugs to get ironed out. I just didn't expect this big of an initial speedbump. Guess there's not much to do but wait for Microsoft to get it right, or close to right.

Also, I thought I'd read they were offering super-sized power control a la scheduled up and down times, etc. More vaporware?

I'm still amazed they get to skate on this kind of stuff.

Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Make that:
Linux: It sucks less.

Not a single issue with sleep or standby

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh. I've got two systems here with Vista running on them, a Dell e1505 notebook and a not-as-new homebuilt Athlon X2 system, and on both of them both hibernate and sleep "Just Work." In fact, Vista's been less problematic in all areas than XP could ever dream of being.

They don't quite Bill's 6 second boot time either - but both systems clock in right around 10 seconds, and that's pretty hard to complain about.

Re:Linux

[bmo]

"Linux: It doesn't suck."

No...NO.

They ALL suck. It's just a matter of degree. Indeed the motivation of people migrating from Win3.1 to Win95 was that 95 "sucked less" and the remark was so common that I swear it became a Microsoft marketing line.

All operating systems suck. You can always point to a particular failing of an OS and say that part sucks or that part has less or more suckage than a corresponding function in another OS.

That said, many OSes, especially OS/X, Linux and the BSDs contain less total amounts of suckage than anything coming out of Redmond at any price.

--
BMO

fud ahead

[Silicon Avatar]

I've had fewer problems with my laptop since installing vista than I ever had with linux.

Pretty much everything worked 'out-the-box' -- including video (although I ultimately had to go download the vista drivers from ATI to get any kind of acceleration), sound, even suspend/sleep (although, microsoft renaming hibernate to sleep confused me at first).

There are plenty of places where microsoft seems to suck across the board .. but vista sleeping and waking up works just fine.

BTW - this sleeping is a feature that I never did get 100% working properly in linux -- and what I WAS able to get working right required I bounce around a few websites ultimatly doing my own research ... whereas it seems to work now in vista just fine?

Huh?

[Jugalator]

This feature works just great here, making it quite impossible it's due to Vista (unless my Vista is magic), but rather due to hardware drivers after all.

Not exactly great with other OSes

[evilviper]

S3 (Suspend) doesn't exactly work wonderfully under other operating systems either. It's highly dependant on the motherboard chipset being used, and all attached hardware.

I would be quicker to condem Microsoft if Linux (or FreeBSD preferably) could properly suspend and resume ANY of my systems properly. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

FreeBSD-6.2 was the closest I got... If I pull out my videocard and use the onboard, it actually resumes successfully.

Though the onboard video (Savag) really blows, and I haven't yet found any version of X.org that doesn't regularly crash when using that particular driver.

And both the onboard nic, and my SBlive card stop working, and I have to manually reload the kernel module every time I resume...

And with all of those addeniums, that's the closest I've ever gotten to getting Suspend to work (and being forced to use the onboard video is a complete show-stopper). In fact, the latest snapshot of 7.0 was actually a downgrade, and wouldn't resume from S3 at all.

So the problem can't lie entirely with Microsoft (though they are partly to blame for the extremely lax and often Windows-centric ACPI practices). Hardware manufacturers bare a great deal of the responsibility for making their ACPI implimentations buggy as all hell to begin with... So much so that even Microsoft apparently can't even work-around it.

No problems here at all.

[Marbleless]

We currently have 4 systems running Vista RTM and a not one of them has any problem waking up from hibernate. They are a mix of P4, AMD XP, and Athlons.

We had Vista RC1 & 2 on other systems, both desktops & laptops, and they behaved perfectly as well.

They all respond perfectly to Wake-On-LAN too. I know this because our tape backup system sends WOL packets to the systems to do the backups.

Pun...

[Five Bucks!]

So much for an operating system to "power" the future! (No pun intended!)

The pun was clearly intended, otherwise there would not have been quotation marks around 'power'.

Why can't we all just be honest about our use of puns? Puns are not always bad. There's no need to be ashamed of them.

Re:How hard can it be?

[hanssprudel]

How hard? Very!

You are right about this. It isn't hard for anybody with a bit of coding experience to realize that trying to freezedry, serialize and then defrost an entire multitasking OS full of running tasks and hardware is a very difficult task. Especially when computers today are often busy talking to other computers (you can't really expect every TCP connection to suddenly spring to life where it was).

That said, Ubuntu 6.10 does hibernate very, very, well. Try it.

Re:How hard can it be?

[diegocgteleline.es]

The big difference is that Linux needs to implement what the hardware designers did, many of the drivers are reverse-engineered or poorly implemented because the lack of specs, and it needs to implement properly the ACPI spec, which is a spec totally broken that doesn't works in the real world (in fact the guys that take care of ACPI in Linux are INTEL employees: you know, Intel invented ACPI, isn't a bit shocking that the company that invented ACPI can't write a implementation that does work 100%? - although ACPI support is pretty good these days)

Windows, in the other hand, just designed all their power management features. It was the hardware designers who took care of making their devices work with Windows. It's not easy to do what the Linux people is doing - trying to make linux suspend work with all the windows-oriented hardware devices out there.

Re:S3 is not hibernate/deep sleep.

[ribond]

The difference in the apple product model shows through here. Power management problems like those described by the story submitter (love that random complaints can be slashdot front page material) are related to bios in use, drivers in use... apple folk obviously deliver an OS to a limited set of hardware, drivers, bioses (did I pluralize that properly?). Windows tries to be all things to all people. breadth vs. depth, etc...

When XP came out many (many many many) systems could not boot in ACPI mode. Many systems had a bios that would report as supporting ACPI and then fall over in an unexpected way... what resolved this was.... time in market. Once it became important to boot XP it became important to pay attention to the ACPI spec. The XP installer actually has a backdoor built in for those dark days of 2001... you can bang on "f7" when you boot into textmode setup (the media-boot phase) and setup will ignore ACPI support.

Vista no longer supports non-acpi machines. Vista also tries to do more with power management and if you have current-ish system from a major OEM (dell, gateway, sony, toshiba, hp, etc) they've already posted BIOS updates to make things go in the brave new world. Partnering with the big guys is where MS can recover some depth in the hardware space.

Vista now provides a new hybrid sleep mode, combining standby with hibernation. The sleep option will write out a hibernate file so that if the machine takes a nap & runs out of juice (laptop scenario here) you can plug the box in and resume without losing your context. I'm typing on a Dell xps m170 right now -- it works well.

Re:Blame ACPI, not Vista

[fbjon]

Wow, it includes its own language too.

Re:Not exactly great with other OSes

[value_added]

FreeBSD-6.2 was the closest I got... If I pull out my videocard and use the onboard, it actually resumes successfully. Though the onboard video (Savag) really blows, and I haven't yet found any version of X.org that doesn't regularly crash when using that particular driver. And both the onboard nic, and my SBlive card stop working, and I have to manually reload the kernel module every time I resume... And with all of those addeniums, that's the closest I've ever gotten to getting Suspend to work (and being forced to use the onboard video is a complete show-stopper). In fact, the latest snapshot of 7.0 was actually a downgrade, and wouldn't resume from S3 at all.

Running 6.1 on several different hardware configurations and two different laptops (Thinkpad and a Toshiba). Suspend (S3) works as expected.

Maybe the lesson here is to choose your hardware more carefully? I can't comment on your existing hardware, but it's worth reminding the kids that crap hardware was probably designed to work OK with Windows. Anywhere else, the user should not expect the hardware to work, either because a) no one wanted to bother with writing a driver for it; or b) the hardware simply can't be made to work (read Winmodems). The fact that some hardware does work (or work with kludges) should be considered an accident.

As a side note, it looks like you haven't looked at /etc/rc.suspend and /etc/rc.resume. No need to manually do anything (loading kernel modules, included), when everything is scriptable with little fuss.

Re:How hard can it be?

[andreyw]

Ugh. I think I am going to stop reading Slashdot now. Okay. So Vista has a problem dealing with S3 resume. Fine.

What bothers me are snide remarks from people who have a very vague (if any) understanding of what is involved in power management support. At all. So Microsoft dropped the non-ACPI HALs with Vista. About time. Considering the number of ACPI "compliant" systems out there, I'm not surprised a lot of this shit barely works. Get a new computer and shut the hell up already...

Re:And with 9 shut down options to boot...

[techno-vampire]

Eliminate all except for the one that says, "Uninstall Vista and revert to previous version of Windows."

Re:Why are you even putting it in sleep mode

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I prefer the way my PowerBook works. I close the lid and it goes to sleep. Open the lid and it comes back up and works perfectly every single time. I haven't turned the thing off since I bought it last year.

Re:Why do they Lie to Us?

[Anonymous Coward]

twitter, please read this carefully. Following this advice will make Slashdot a better place for everyone, including yourself.

• As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.
• Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions.
• A thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a posting will not only provide insight for your readers, but will also increase their respect for your knowledge and abilities.
• Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
• Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash the competition. Linux is a good, solid product that stands on its own.
• Respect the use of other operating systems. While Linux is a wonderful platform, it does not meet everyone's needs.
• Refer to another product by its proper name. There's nothing to be gained by attempting to ridicule a company or its products by using "creative spelling". If we expect respect for Linux, we must respect other products.
• Give credit where credit is due. Linux is just the kernel. Without the efforts of people involved with the GNU project , MIT, Berkeley and others too numerous to mention, the Linux kernel would not be very useful to most people.
• Don't insist that Linux is the only answer for a particular application. Just as the Linux community cherishes the freedom that Linux provides them, Linux only solutions would deprive others of their freedom.
• There will be cases where Linux is not the answer. Be the first to recognize this and offer another solution.

From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy [ibiblio.org]

Re:How hard can it be?

[Skreems]

Since network connections can and do fail with some frequency, any decent networking app should be able to detect and recover from a dropped connection.

I don't see how this is such a huge deal in Vista, anyway. It seems to work fine under XP, and you're going to be running most of the same apps for now...

Re:Not exactly great with other OSes

[evilviper]

I actually wonder why that is the case. In other areas (say, Java) you don't see anybody selling something claiming it's Java, when it's not (MS tried and didn't succeed).

The main reason is that ACPI bugs can be worked-around in software (if you know everything there is to know about the hardware and BIOS implementation) and the manufacturer has to write a driver anyhow. So they do a quick, one-off driver that just barely works, and don't care about all the problems that will result from that mindset in the near future.