Ubuntu 18.04 - Dell XPS13 9370 no longer suspends on lid close

This was working perfectly on 17.10 but after upgrading to 18.04 yesterday, when the lid is closed the screen turns off but doesn't suspend properly.

I travel around a lot and immediately noticed the heat (and battery draining) when taking it out of the travel case.

I've tried uncommenting these lines in /etc/systemd/logind.conf

HandleLidSwitch=suspend
HandleLidSwitchDocked=suspend

and restarted but didn't make any difference.

Solution 1:

I think I managed to figure out what was going on, thanks to these two sources: Dell XPS 13 (9370) ArchLinux Install notes and Arch Linux Forum.

For some reason, the laptop is not going in deep sleep anymore, but rather an s2idle mode which is merely a screen off type of suspend.

Diagnosis of the issue

To confirm whether this is the case for your system, suspend the laptop using your favorite method (close the lid, hit Fn+End, write pm-suspend in a terminal if you have pm-utils installed, or hit the Windows key type suspend and hit the Enter key).

Wake up from suspend mode and type in a terminal: sudo journalctl | grep "PM: suspend" | tail -2. If the output is

May 13 18:41:00 mex kernel: PM: suspend entry (s2idle)
May 13 20:52:36 mex kernel: PM: suspend exit

Then you are not entering deep sleep. You can also check cat /sys/power/mem_sleep which should return

[s2idle] deep

which confirms that the default suspend mode is s2idle (since it is highlighted with brackets).

Temporary fix

To try a temporary fix, do echo deep > /sys/power/mem_sleep as a root user. Check that it was successful by looking at the output of cat /sys/power/mem_sleep which should be

s2idle [deep]

then suspend the laptop and wake up again. If sudo journalctl | grep "PM: suspend" | tail -2 returns

May 13 18:41:00 mex kernel: PM: suspend entry (deep)
May 13 20:52:36 mex kernel: PM: suspend exit

then the issue should be fixed. You can put your computer to sleep for a couple of hours and check whether the battery drain improved.

Permanent fix

To make it permanent, you have to edit your bootloader cmdline. To do so, edit as root user the file /etc/default/grub, by running for example sudo -H gedit /etc/default/grub. Replace the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

with

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash mem_sleep_default=deep"

and regenerate your grub configuration (run sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg).

Solution 2:

Try creating /etc/systemd/sleep.conf:

[Sleep]
SuspendMode=
SuspendState=mem

And reboot. This seems to be working for me, although I'm not certain I didn't also get improvement with the /etc/systemd/logind.conf change I did first. In any case, no heat or fan noise is observed while suspended with the lid shut, and it doesn't respond to ping over wifi either, which I had been getting, intermittently, before.

Battery life still goes down while suspended, probably because the working method of suspend is just less efficient than the default, ideal, method that apparently isn't working properly, but it appears better than the default behaviour.

Tried on my XPS 13 9370, I don't know about older models, although it seems likely they'll be similar.

I had tried installing pm-utils and using pm-suspend and that seemed to be suspending pretty effectively, so I wanted to see if I could make systemd-suspend do the same thing.

I looked through the scripts in pm-utils to figure out what it was actually doing, and it looks like, in this situation, it was doing echo -n "mem" > /sys/power/state. So I created the /etc/systemd/sleep.conf file as shown above to match it.

It's not entirely clear what the default behaviour is. The manpage for systemd-sleep.conf says that the distro should include /etc/systemd/sleep.conf with the compiled-in defaults commented out, so you can see this information, but in ubuntu this file is missing. I noticed though that if you cat /sys/power/state you get:

freeze mem

So I'm guessing that this is what it's doing by default. My guess is that freeze may be being accepted, in that it doesn't throw an error, which would otherwise cause systemd to move on to mem, but maybe doesn't actually work properly, or reliably, for complex reasons we seem unable to determine. So just sending mem instead is a hopeful stab at avoiding that and just doing what pm-suspend does.

I suspect the SuspendMode setting is actually superfluous and doesn't do anything anyway. I suspect this because cat /sys/power/disk just gets you:

[disabled]

Am new user, thus unable to comment with an observation, forced to present it as an answer as if I'm super-confident in it! But I think it's working.

Solution 3:

The other answers here are excellent, in-depth and well researched.

Unfortunately they didn't work for my particular machine :(

If you have nVidia graphics, there seems to be a fix that is working for a good number of people, helpfully provided by cascagrossa in the answer to this question: Ubuntu 18.04 crashes on resuming from suspend

It is suspected to be a buggy nouveau driver and can sort out suspend issues by adding nouveau.modeset=0 to grub and has been confirmed in the comments for helping fix the issue for others too.

I've got Intel graphics on my problem machine and curiously I've had no suspend problems with Ubuntu or Kubuntu 18.04 on at least 3 other machines (my friend's and my own), so why this particular machine is being such a douche about it is unclear.

I recommend anyone experiencing this sort of issue to follow these steps to help identify the problem:

1. Do you have nVidia graphics? If so, try the nouveau.modeset=0 grub trick.

2. Check that suspend works at all. If you are closing the lid and then opening it up later and it's not waking up, it may seem like it's failing to 'resume'.

   • You should be able to manually select suspend on any desktop but it's slightly hidden in Gnome Shell - you can either longpress the power button from the top right hand menu of the screen, or click that button whilst holding Alt or press the Super key and type in 'suspend'

   • By selecting suspend you can check that the screen has switched off, the power LED is flashing as it should and you'd expect that any fan running will also stop. If all this happens but then you can't get your machine to waken up then it would appear to be a 'resume' problem rather than a 'suspend' problem.

   • My issue has been that it's not actually going into suspend and Murray who asked the original question, when asked by collisionTwo to check this, realised the problem was arising when manually suspending too.

   • In my case (on the one problem laptop), the screen goes blank but the power LED stays on and if the fan is running it continues to run. The machine does not respond to any keypresses, touchpad movement or clicks or power button presses. The only thing that can be done is to shut it down.

   • I've tried playing music whilst going into suspend (to check that it's not just the screen going blank) but the music stops and the machine has basically seized up.

3. Try your machine with a Live USB of 18.04 and check if you have similar suspend issues.

   • This will just confirm that the suspend issues are not to do with any additional programs that you have installed.

   • In my case I suspected it was because I had installed tlp which might have been interfering with the suspend mode somehow, but the same behaviour occurred with a Live USB of both Ubuntu 18.04 and Kubuntu 18.04

4. Try out the other two well researched solutions provided here by monty47 and StrangeNoises and see if you get good results.

   • They seem to have helped a number of people get suspend back up and running properly on 18.04 and may be more to do with the machine going into an s2idle state rather than the sleep (deep) mode of a usual 'suspend'.

5. If none of the solutions are working to resolve your suspend issues on 18.04 then try the accepted answer to this: Ubuntu 18.04 crashes on resuming from suspend

   • The provided solution by Matalak (who also asked the question) was to use UKUU to try an older 4.14 kernel.

   • My problem machine had no suspend issues with Ubuntu 17.10 and Kubuntu 17.10, so it makes sense since 17.10 uses the 4.14 kernel. It now suspends fine in both Ubuntu 18.04 and Kubuntu 18.04 using the 4.14 kernel.

6. If you tried the other solutions and could only fix your suspend issues by going back to a 4.14 kernel, you might be interested in the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1774950

   • It appears to only be affecting a few machines with a specific combination of hardware and can be difficult to identify in amongst other nouveau related problems or s2idle issues.

   • It seems to be more prevalent for those running a Bay Trail Atom Celeron/Pentium but others have reported a similar issue with other machines.

   • If you are able to check your kern.log after this failed suspend (i.e once you've had to shut down your machine and restart) you might notice it says PM: suspend entry (deep) and then you have no further entries apart from the many lines of booting up again.

   • There is currently a patch that seems to resolve the issue.

   • If you feel like adding your voice to the bug report, it would be interesting to see which particular machines are affected (and check that the patch fixes the issue for everyone).

Also attempting to gather 'Suspend Issues in 18.04' together in this thread: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2395562&p=13780724#post13780724