AMD S2idle Support For Linux Getting Squared Away

[Schugy]

Suspend works great on my HP 15s-eq0355ng (292 €) and it is ok on my Lenovo Ideapd G50-45. Just have to close and open the lid again. S2idle is a nice addition if it's supported.

[tajjada]

Yeah, the whole concept is garbage. WiFi is one of the biggest power consumers on a laptop, and as you say, the whole @#$%ing POINT of suspend is that it powers everything down to, yknow, save power. I really don't want the 200GB+/day of writes to an SSD that hibernation causes as the only way to work around this sort of stupidity.

Maybe rfkill can help enough to be a workable way to deal with things, but I'd much rather just have proper suspend in the first place.

Yeah well, I am not gonna just shit on the concept. I am sure some people out there like it (like maybe if you use the laptop mostly in an office environment and benefit from notifications? idk). I am totally cool with it being supported as an use case.

I am just upset that they are pushing it as the *only* supported form of suspend. Removing the traditional S3 suspend state.

[arQon]

Yeah well, I am not gonna just shit on the concept.

I am just upset that they are pushing it as the *only* supported form of suspend. Removing the traditional S3 suspend state.

And that's why I AM "gonna just shit on the concept". It being "supported as a use case" is one thing, and I have no problem with that. But when it comes at the EXPENSE of S3 - which seems to be the majority case judging by the comments - and is objectively massively inferior to that in literally every important real-world case, it DESERVES to be objected to strongly.

Nobody should be supporting manufacturers who are producing laptops without working Suspend in this day and age, regardless of what bull$#!t hipster excuse they use or whatever defective other forms of S3 they *replace* it with. So now this is another aspect that consumers have to return to investigating ahead of time, just like we used to have to when Suspend failed to work properly on a lot of them under Linux, when we'd finally gotten past that. sigh...

[tajjada]

Did it come with Linux or Windows pre-installed?

It came with Windows. But the behaviour is the same in Windows, too. Regardless of OS, sometimes even the CPU FAN continues spinning for a while, when the system is supposed to be "suspended".

It's not gonna last more than 24 hrs, no matter the OS.

[brent]

s2idle is in principle a really good idea. It's kinda similar to the low-power modes of smartphones and the like. However, implementation is still somewhat spotty, especially under Linux. I don't get the hate though. It works fine on various Dell XPS machines for me. XPS computers have many problems, but s2idle works fine.

If your only experience with s2idle is from a few years ago, try again. Linux support is much better nowadays.

Edit: when I say it works fine I mean that battery life is decent. Something like 0.5% per hour, comparable to S3.

[ascaris]

s2idle is in principle a really good idea. It's kinda similar to the low-power modes of smartphones and the like. However, implementation is still somewhat spotty, especially under Linux. I don't get the hate though. It works fine on various Dell XPS machines for me. XPS computers have many problems, but s2idle works fine.

As this is still an issue in 2022, I'm responding to this post even though it's several months old.

I get the anger. I don't know that I would call it hate... hate is a pretty strong word.

It is not just that Dell decided to follow Microsoft down the "a PC is really just a big phone" rabbit hole as far as supporting a feature of such dubious value even if it does work as well at conserving battery power as S3 (which is by no means a given, as the various posters in this thread can attest). Did Dell imagine scores of people leaving their phones at home and carrying XPS laptops around in their pockets and purses, with those laptops partially powered up to alert the user to an incoming SMS text, Snapchat, or "like" on their latest Facebook post of last night's dinner? It seems to me that they are still going to have their phones with them, and will still use those phones for those things even if they have an XPS handy and ready at a moment's notice.

If Dell merely decided to implement such a "feature," that would be one thing. One could simply not use it, instead relying on the tried and true PC style S3 standby rather than the phone style pseudo-standby that is euphemized by Microsoft as "modern standby." But we can't do that, because S3 standby was completely removed in favor of the new thing. That's the problem.

If your only experience with s2idle is from a few years ago, try again. Linux support is much better nowadays.

Edit: when I say it works fine I mean that battery life is decent. Something like 0.5% per hour, comparable to S3.

Dell has been selling XPS models with Linux preinstalled for more than a few years. Even knowing that Linux support for S2idle was poor (which also means the use cases where S2idle would be useful were not in Linux either), they still decided to remove the feature from the laptops they knew they were selling with Linux preinstalled. They could easily have made it an option in the UEFI (and according to some of the posters, they did, but only in select models), but they chose not to.

My XPS 13 (9310) came with Ubuntu 20.04 preinstalled. It's no longer on there... I am now using Kubuntu 22.04. S2idle does seem to work pretty well... when I went to bed last night, my battery was at 97%, and when I woke up 8 hours later, it was at 94%. That's pretty close to (and slightly better than, though within the margin of error) the 0.5% per hour you say is comparable to S3. But how comparable is it to S3? I'd like to be able to compare it and find out.

FWIW, my Dell G3 (3579) laptop with i7-8750H CPU does have S3 sleep, and it resumes from standby and is ready to go in about 3-4 seconds. My XPS takes about one second. Until I timed it, I thought the G3 was actually faster than that... it just isn't that noticeable of a time to wait. If it saves any bit more battery than S2idle, even just a tiny fraction more, it would be worth it, if I had that option.