Skip to main content


State of S3 - Your Laptop is no Laptop anymore


In this article, I aim to take a different approach. We will begin by defining a laptop according to my understanding. The I will share my personal history and journey to this point, as well as my current situation with my home and work laptops. Using this perspective, we will explore the current dysfunctionality of the standby function in modern laptops, followed by a discussion of why this feature still has relevance and right to exist. Finally, we will draw conclusions on what we can learn and take away from this.

Linux reshared this.

in reply to Jure Repinc

Am I the only idiot who uses systemctl hibernate with a proper swap partition? Works perfect every time I've set it up.

Linux reshared this.

in reply to eshep

You are not the only person. However, even hibernation mode isn't a sure thing anymore.
in reply to The Doctor

Whatcha mean by "not a sure thing"? Is there some issue with specific hardware, or configuration?

Linux reshared this.

in reply to eshep

askubuntu.com/questions/114632…
in reply to Lem453

Everything on that page refers to configuration problems. Most of them inferring a misunderstanding (or complete disregard) of the requirements that need to be implemented prior to configuring suspend-to-disk in order for it to work properly. Both the gentoo, and arch wikis have very thorough instructions on how to successfully incorporate this feature.
in reply to eshep

I mean, even then it might not work. I'm wrestling with it right now (Lemur Pro 13 from System76) and from plain old suspend mode the machine still wakes up randomly (it pops up on my monitoring network as active, and can even be SSH'd into when it's supposed to be in lower power mode). Also, suspend-to-disk hibernation only resumes correctly about 13% of the time (I've been keeping stats while debugging it).
in reply to Jure Repinc

Where can I find beforehand which laptop supports S3? Are there any know brands that do?
in reply to ThyTTY

Nothing with a recent AMD gfx Card or APU will officially support S3, and I think Nvidia is the same. Just because it isn't supported doesn't mean they'll intentionally break anything, but over time you'll have more and more bugs related to it and one day it will break and never be fixed.

Personally I use S4 (hibernate) more or less exclusively.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to user

Edit! I'm wrong! Read below comment

A hibernation state where your laptop completely powers off saving current ram to disk to resume from when the system is powered back on. The article is a pretty interesting read!

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to takeheart

I wonder. The Steam Deck holds charge very well, but then another comment here says "Nothing with with a recent AMD gfx Card or APU will officially support S3". Perhaps the Steam Deck uses hibernate? It launches pretty fast, but then maybe storing memory to the built-in SSD is fast enough. Or perhaps even if not officially supported the S3 in the Steam Deck's APU still works well enough. Or perhaps the APU is older than I think it is.
in reply to thedeadwalking4242

In windows 10 you can reenable it, but you have dig a bit in the power management control panel to do so.

Its unfortunate that this thinking has bled over to Linux.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to thedeadwalking4242

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to user

To be fair to you, I thought they were talking about AWS S3 at first and was very confused until I read the article.
in reply to user

Sleep in RAM, meaning only the ram is powered/refreshed, everything else like cpu or SSD are unpowered.
in reply to user

The S3 "sleep state" of the computer. Which I guess is sleep. There sre other numbers for running and off I think.
in reply to I_Miss_Daniel

in reply to Jure Repinc

S0idle is a real problem.

Years ago you put your laptop in sleep S3 mode at 5PM, put in the backpack, resume it at 9AM the next morning and it lost maybe 10% battery.

Now S0idle is like a cellphone, always powered, so you put your laptop in a backpack, windows/Linux half support a botched S0 so some devices are still powered, either your laptop overheat or dies because battery reach 0% during the night.

in reply to Papamousse

This. S0idle was pushed by Microsoft and Intel and amd followed. Now all new non apple CPUs are an embarrassment when it comes to sleep ability which essentially any normal person would expect without thinking about it so when they buy a brand new laptop and it ends up with a dead batter every morning people immediately just buy a Mac and get a much better experience.

Just completely shooting themselves in the foot. Same story with shitty laptop screens for nearly 5 years while Macs had retina displays.

in reply to Jure Repinc

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Jure Repinc

This is the result of Microsoft being so cozy with hardware vendors.
Unknown parent

leopold
It's not an unpopular opinion that Apple is the only one that does sleep right. It is an unpopular opinion that this is only possible because they have a complete walled garden and that open platforms are fucked, especially considering it is easy and common to install applications from outside the App Store on macOS. We used to have sleep figured out, that's what S3 was. But then hardware vendors dropped it. So yes, drivers and hardware vendors are part of the problem. The Steam Deck is an example of an open platform where sleep works fine.
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Jure Repinc

Yo, setup hibernation and use hybrid sleep as your default sleep.

ln -s /etc/systemd/system/suspend.target ../../../usr/lib/systemd/system/suspend-then-hibernate.target

Now any sleep is hybrid. The machine suspends, then wakes up after a timeout, and enters hibernation. The timeout is configurable in systemd-sleep.conf(5).

With this combo I find that I prefer S0 to S3. S0 drains the battery about twice as fast, sure, but it resumes instantaneously, while S3 takes about 30 seconds (!) to resume on this machine. And the thing hibernates and powers off if I leave it for an hour anyway.

in reply to leopold

100% this. Sleep on Linux is perfect in my older XPS (after I manually enable it). Lots of reports of it not working on newer laptops.

While I agree it doesn't have to be a walled garden, you do have to admit that apple wouldn't ship a laptop that couldn't sleep properly. They are so much better at real world design than other manufacturers who were happy to abandon s3 in favour of making laptops into phones as if anyone actually wanted that.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Lem453

Sleep is hit-or-miss even on System76 laptops. Dead simple on my XPS, though.
in reply to The Doctor

What generation do you have? I have an XPS-15 9560, it doesn't seem to have it enabled.