Power consumption and suspend to ram

[robt]

Hi termac, I confirm no audio after suspend...

[rik-shaw]

Coming to this thread late but just wondering if there are any distros that get it *right* out of the box, or do these tweaks need to be applied regardless of distro?

Is there a minimum kernel number (eg 5.6, so Armbian couldn't be fixed since it is on 4.4?)

Finally, for clarity could someone post a "comprehensive" list of what tweaks are needed after fresh install of a distro (eg Manjaro XFCE, etc)? That way when latecomers come they don't have to piece together different tips from multiple posts. It could then be a "sticky" as I think many are facing this challenge: they have new shiny PBPs but the battery drains when sleeping over night (that's my case).

[rik-shaw]

Coming to this thread late but just wondering if there are any distros that get it *right* out of the box, or do these tweaks need to be applied regardless of distro?

Is there a minimum kernel number (eg 5.6, so Armbian couldn't be fixed since it is on 4.4?)

Finally, for clarity could someone post a "comprehensive" list of what tweaks are needed after fresh install of a distro (eg Manjaro XFCE, etc)? That way when latecomers come they don't have to piece together different tips from multiple posts. It could then be a "sticky" as I think many are facing this challenge: they have new shiny PBPs but the battery drains when sleeping over night (that's my case).

Better yet would be to get the necessary information to the wiki so that users don't have to trawl the forum to find fixes. So if we can consolidate a list of tweaks needed to get suspend to work it would be great to get those to the wiki: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebook_Pro

[xmixahlx]

i am basically doing that in pbp-tools and my pinebook-pro-debian-installer fork with the hwaccel kernel on debian.

[rik-shaw]

i am basically doing that in pbp-tools and my pinebook-pro-debian-installer fork with the hwaccel kernel on debian.

xmixahlx, thanks for the suggestions. Again I am new to this so I hadn't run across your stuff before.

When starting from scratch, a bit confused on whether to use the original debian-installer (which was updated as recently as 18 days ago) or yours. Is yours doing additional things to target deep sleep by default? Or maybe you simply use that different kernel than the original debian-installer? Are you looking to keep in sync by keeping on top of commits to the original script? Or?

Any interest in then posting the resulting image or do you prefer to keep it at the script level so that it won't need rebuilding all the time? Just curious over your longer term idea.

Regarding all the great tools in pbp-tools, are there several that are "good for all pbp users", then the others are if you want to install specific software packages, etc?

We would need to walk relatively low-tech users through the process of getting their pbp to a reasonable running state. That is why I am asking for any wiki updates and/or updated images.

Lastly, we have some software that is built for Ubuntu and distributed via ppa. Not sure what it may break but I would be testing if it would be reasonable to add and use an Ubuntu PPA.

Thanks again for the great work!

[mamboman777]

The battery life of my PBP is really good, I get 8+ hours with my usage (browsing, bit of vnc, paying attention to brightness levels).

However, I have some problems with suspend to ram.
First, it wasn't always going into suspend to ram, though since some updates yesterday, this seems to have been fixed.

Second, when suspending to ram, after 2.5 hrs the battery still lost about 13% (82% to 69%), so that's barely better than keeping it running.

Is that normal?

The reason I ask: I have a Huawei tablet (M5 Lite) which runs seemingly forever, but also when just leaving it, it does fetch update information (so at some point wifi and other stuff is somewhat active), but otherwise it will lose about 20% in a week or more. I unplugged it this morning and it just sat idle all day, and just now it still has 100% charge...

Then another question: is it possible to do a suspend to disk? Or are there special reasons why that isn't recommended?
On my commute, there's a crap data connection, so I'd like to load a bunch of webpages at home or at work, then read on the go. With suspend to ram consuming a lot of battery, esp. when forgetting about it at work, I'll be stuck with a dead battery...

Any thoughts?




[Edit 2020-06-21 after getting proper suspend to ram working]

I got my Pinebook Pro in May 2020, these fixes are therefore for an ootb Manjaro 19 PBP.
With the guidance in this thread below I managed to get to where I'm at now.

My PBP is up to date in terms of software updates, so it already runs kernel 5.7.0-1-MANJARO-ARM. Kernel 5.6+ is one of the prerequisites for proper suspend to ram.

With dmesg and journalctl -f I could figure out that the sleep mode (closing the lid or Fn+ESC = Zz) was indeed not really suspend to ram.

I modified /etc/systemd/sleep.conf
#SuspendState=freeze
SuspendState=mem
and disallowed any Hibernate lines, not sure if that would be necessary, so just in case.

I installed bsp uboot, package name and version: uboot-pinebookpro-bsp (1.5-7), which tells me this at the end of the installation:
A new U-Boot version needs to be flashed our install drive. Please use lsblk to determine your drive, before proceeding.
You can do this by running:
# dd if=/boot/idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblkX seek=64 conv=notrunc
# dd if=/boot/uboot.img of=/dev/mmcblkX seek=16384 conv=notrunc
# dd if=/boot/trust.img of=/dev/mmcblkX seek=24576 conv=notrunc
Transaction successfully finished.

lsblk outputs this:
# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk2 179:0 0 58.2G 0 disk
├─mmcblk2p1 179:1 0 213.6M 0 part /boot
└─mmcblk2p2 179:2 0 58G 0 part /
mmcblk2boot0 179:32 0 4M 1 disk
mmcblk2boot1 179:64 0 4M 1 disk
zram0 252:0 0 5.6G 0 disk [SWAP]

So then I had to do this:
# dd if=/boot/idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=64 conv=notrunc
# dd if=/boot/uboot.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=16384 conv=notrunc
# dd if=/boot/trust.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=24576 conv=notrunc

after which a reboot got me to functional suspend to ram - I can see that the CPUs are put to sleep with journalctl, and overnight, the battery lost less than 3%.

I'm trying to figure this out. I am using an spiflash.bin and booting directly from an NVME drive. How will the procedure be different? Has anyone successfully implemented boot from NVME and suspend to ram?

[wdt]

The nvme (which runs off a pcie port), at this time, is not capable of suspend, sorry
That is, it suspends, then a few seconds later wakes up

[mamboman777]

The nvme (which runs off a pcie port), at this time, is not capable of suspend, sorry
That is, it suspends, then a few seconds later wakes up

Thanks for the reply and clarification. Saves me time trying to figure it out. *Shrugs* Boots fast enough anyways.

[User 18041]

Hi,

I am using the PBP with Manjaro KDE Plasma 20.10 (the last update).

I was following the steps from this forum page in order to be able to use the suspend to ram feature: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10250
All the steps went fine, but after reboot the green light appears immediately and nothing else happens.

Can you please help?

1. Was I doing anything wrong? I have a 128GB emmc installed.
2. How can I recover from this state?

---

Hi,

I am using the PBP with Manjaro KDE Plasma 20.10 (the last update).

I was following the steps from this forum page in order to be able to use the suspend to ram feature: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10250
All the steps went fine, but after reboot the green light appears immediately and nothing else happens.

Can you please help?

1. Was I doing anything wrong? I have a 128GB emmc installed.
2. How can I recover from this state?

And now I just did it again for my 64GB emmc
Installed uboot-pinebookpro-bsp (1.5-7), and ran
sudo dd if=/boot/idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=64 conv=notrunc
sudo dd if=/boot/uboot.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=16384 conv=notrunc
sudo dd if=/boot/trust.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=24576 conv=notrunc

My 2 emmcs are not booting anymore.

I suppose that I can take them out, re-imagine them using my Mac and the SD-EMMC adapter + the Manjaro 20.10 image.
But I would like to recover them though, without reinstalling everything.

Can anyone help with a procedure on how to make them again to boot?

Thank you very much in advance.

[User 18041]

Hi,

I am using the PBP with Manjaro KDE Plasma 20.10 (the last update).

I was following the steps from this forum page in order to be able to use the suspend to ram feature: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10250
All the steps went fine, but after reboot the green light appears immediately and nothing else happens.

Can you please help?

1. Was I doing anything wrong? I have a 128GB emmc installed.
2. How can I recover from this state?

---

Hi,

I am using the PBP with Manjaro KDE Plasma 20.10 (the last update).

I was following the steps from this forum page in order to be able to use the suspend to ram feature: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10250
All the steps went fine, but after reboot the green light appears immediately and nothing else happens.

Can you please help?

1. Was I doing anything wrong? I have a 128GB emmc installed.
2. How can I recover from this state?

And now I just did it again for my 64GB emmc
Installed uboot-pinebookpro-bsp (1.5-7), and ran
sudo dd if=/boot/idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=64 conv=notrunc
sudo dd if=/boot/uboot.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=16384 conv=notrunc
sudo dd if=/boot/trust.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=24576 conv=notrunc

My 2 emmcs are not booting anymore.

I suppose that I can take them out, re-imagine them using my Mac and the SD-EMMC adapter + the Manjaro 20.10 image.
But I would like to recover them though, without reinstalling everything.

Can anyone help with a procedure on how to make them again to boot?

Thank you very much in advance.

Update nr. 2

1. I have created a bootable SD with Manjaro 20.10
2. I have opened the back cover and disabled the emmc switch
3. I have inserted the SD and started the PBP, and after 5 seconds I have turned on the emmc switch
4. I ended up to my login page. I logged in and I have realised that the laptop is using now the /boot partition of the SD and the /root of the emmc
5. The wifi card is not detected

I will try to check how can I reflash the uboot from this state, to be able to boot again from the emmc. Until now I have no clue how to do it.