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

Question

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

Solution 4

Just want to add an answer to users of Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th Gen which has a similar symptom i.e. battery drain while suspended which is caused also by not entering deep sleep mode.

This issue is discussed on this thread on Lenovo's forum, in short the X1C6 opted to support Windows Modern Standby. If you read that thread carefully, you would see that although the symptom is shared, the root causes vary greatly between the XPS 13 9370 and the X1C6. e.g. The output of cat /sys/power/mem_sleep on the X1C6 would only be [s2idle] indicating missing support for deep sleep.

The solutions posted so far for this question applies only to the XPS 13, and not to the X1C6. As far as I understand the best solution to the X1C6's suspend mode issue is to apply a DSDT patch first given by Delta Xi, and subsequently updated by PombeirP. This post takes you through how to apply the patch, but make sure you read the post and all of its updates before any actions.

I wrote a gist documenting issues related to the installation of Ubuntu 18.04 on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th Gen including solutions I found about the slow boot issue caused by LVM as well as this deep sleep issue.

Solution 5

I believe this kernel bug is related:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199689

See comment #3 in particular:

[…] it's actually intentional to be using s2idle on this machine with the latest upstream kernel.

View more solutions

Comments

[collisionTwo]

Voting up because I have the same issue on 18.04 as of a couple days ago. Previously was on 17.04. On a Dell XPS15. Can you check to see if your suspend (i.e., just running suspend without closing the lid) also doesn't work properly? If so, same issue here.

[karlgrz]

@collisionTwo same here. Dell XPS 9560, 18.04. Clicking "Suspend" does not actually suspend the system, it shuts it down.

[karlgrz]

I had previously used the hack mentioned here on 16.04, worked great, might have to revert to that. Was hoping to avoid it but /shrug: karlgrz.com/dell-xps-15-ubuntu-tweaks

[collisionTwo]

I might play around with that hack. Strange thing was things worked completely fine for me on 17.04. My problem is slightly different - when I "suspend", either manually or by closing the lid, it turns off the screen and keyboard light, but the fans stay on, the power light stays on, and trying to wake it up from this state doesn't work at all.

[karlgrz]

@collisionTwo I'm on 9550, not 9560, my bad. So I tried my old hack and it didn't fix it. What I can confirm just worked for me was updating the BIOS to 1.6.1 (here: dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/…, change model for 9560). 9560 was last updated 4 days ago (1.9.4). Might be worth a look?

[Murray]

@collisionTwo yes, you're right. It happens when manually suspending too!

[collisionTwo]

Unfortunately, I tried upgrading to 1.9.4 when I first encountered this problem and it didn't fix it. Must be an issue between BIOS versions for different Dell machines?

[pHeLiOn]

@collisionTwo - I am experiencing this issue too. Suspend does not work on Ubuntu or Kubuntu 18.04 but does work fine with Ubuntu and Kubuntu 17.10 (or with 18.04 using the 4.14 kernel - solution to askubuntu.com/questions/1029405/…) . I have opened a bug report but if you could add your voice to it and help them understand the issue (seems to be only affecting a small number of specific hardware setups) that might help us all out!

[pHeLiOn]

bug report linked in my 'answer' to askubuntu.com/questions/1029405/…

[pHeLiOn]

Murray, can I just ask if the answer with the 'accepted' tick worked for you? I tried the suggestions in the answers but it didn't work for my machine. The solution that worked for me is here: askubuntu.com/questions/1029405/… which is to use the 4.14 kernel. I'm trying to work out if there is kernel problem that only affects a small number of users. It's a very particular "doesn't actually go into suspend" issue, so would be interested to know if it was the s2idle change that fixed it for you.

[Murray]

@pHeLiOn Hi, yes the accepted answer is the one that worked for me.

[pHeLiOn]

@Murray - thanks for the reply. Been experiencing a similar looking problem but wasn't s2idle. It's only affecting a small number of machines but fortunately the bug is being looked into and a fix seems to be in the works. Glad your suspend issue got sorted too :)

[StrangeNoises]

Alternative permanent fix, that doesn't involve changing kernel parameters: Install sysfsutils and echo 'power/mem_sleep = deep' > /etc/sysfs.d/mem_sleep.conf. sysfsutils is a tiny service that just restores sysfs parameters like this.

[StrangeNoises]

This method certainly works, however it exposes another problem. It seems the bluetooth adapter isn't able to reliably wake up (it usually disappears for me after the second such sleep). This is a known problem described and possibly fixed here, where for the 9360 they've added a quirk to reset the adapter on resume. Looks like it'll be in 4.17. workaround btusb.enable_autosuspend=n only appears in 4.16 so we can't use that yet either. May have to install Fedora to join that conversation and confirm same fix for 9370 would work.

[Caleb Jay]

I love this in depth answer, but in ubuntu 18 I'm getting issues at the echo deep step, wherein I'm getting an echo: write error: Invalid argument. This may be because i'm not in root properly. I can't su - because ubuntu has it disabled, so I tried both sudo -i and sudo su

[me47]

You don't technically need to do an echo command, if you can change the contents of /sys/power/mem_sleep to s2idle [deep] manually that would work. Also this is just a temporary fix, you can try the permament fix and revert back if it doesn't work.

[Akihiro HARAI]

On Dell XPS 13 (9370), deep suspend mode doesn't work properly if disk encryption is enabled on Ubuntu 18.04. dell.com/community/XPS/…

[Jeremy Danyow]

If you have a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Gen, this post will be helpful: jonfriesen.ca/blog/lenovo-x1-carbon-and-ubuntu-18.04

[hackerb9]

@CalebJay: Ubuntu spells su - as sudo -i. You can also change the root password with sudo passwd, if that's the way you prefer to administer your Unix boxes.

[Daniele Santi]

This is a questions and answers site, not a link collection. Please include relevant content in your answer, not just a link to where the content may be. The link is nice to have in addition for reference or for further information. For more tips, see How to answer.

[B.Tanner]

Update: 18.04.02 has now been released, and with it the 18.04 LTS HWE update. But you won't get it automatically through the update/upgrade system! You need to sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04 xserver-xorg-hwe-18.04 (contains a new kernel). I still needed to do the Permanent Fix above but my XPS 13 9370 now drops from 100% battery to 94% when I close the lid and leave it for 12 hours. The new X server in the update also fixes the ubiquitous problem of the mouse being constrained incorrectly on an external monitor when scaling used. Happy :-)

[nateleavitt]

This answer worked for me on a Dell XPS 13 9380 running Ubuntu 18.10.

[vcarel]

It works on my XPS 9380, Ubuntu 18.10 without the mentionned side-effect (bluetooth and wifi dead). I can see the wifi and bluetooth are off at resume, but the system enable them 2 seconds later.

[Gunnar Forsgren - Mobimation]

Permanent fix worked perfectly on XPS 15 9570 (18.04.2 LTS)

[Matthias]

Thanks for this incredibly useful and detailed answer, together with @StrangeNoises suggestion to use sysfsutils it solved the problem for me. I also found this documentation from kernel.org on power states helpful for some context: kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt

[Maximus]

Works for Ubuntu 19.04 as well.

[Robin Gower]

Update from the linked thread - it looks like there's now a candidate patch for that bug (that NVME doesn't go into a proper state) in kernel 5.3.

[xioxox]

Just to add that there's now a BIOS update for the X1 which allows sleep to switch to S3 (deep) instead of S2IDLE.

[B.Gao]

@xioxox do you have a link to this update?

[xioxox]

it looks like version 1.30 adds this: download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles/n23uj21w.txt "Support Optimized Sleep State for Linux in ThinkPad Setup"

[Andrew]

Thanks for writing such a useful summary post. My laptop was failing to suspend (rather than failing to resume). I tried solutions 1-4 but they didn't work. However, in case this helps someone else. I found out that if I turn off wifi then suspend works for me. As a clunky work around I can just switch off wifi each time, but I should be able to either fix or automate this. Lenovo Yoga 3 11 - 80J8 - Intel® Core™ M-5Y10c CPU @ 0.80GHz × 4 - Intel® HD Graphics 5300 (Broadwell GT2) - Ubuntu 19.10

[CoderGuy123]

I can't edit /sys/power/mem_sleep even as root. If I save in e.g. nano, the file will immediately revert back to containing [s2idle]. Running Mint 20.

[CoderGuy123]

I'm on a Dell 17 7706, and Mint 20, and I get freeze mem disk from cat /sys/power/state. I've tried everything in this thread so far, nothing seems to be able to get it to deep sleep. NVMe issue? Disk encryption?

[CoderGuy123]

Any news on this? My Dell 17 7706 cannot boot on kernel 5.3 or 5.4 series. Works on 5.8 Ubuntu or non-Ubuntu kernels, but the sleep problem is there. Mint 20.

[CoderGuy123]

Did not work for my Dell 17 7706 on Mint 20.

[Raghavendra P]

I had this issue on a Focal (20.04) on a Dell XPS 9360. I have all partitions except /boot sitting on an encrypted LUKS device with LVM on top. The 'permanent fix' worked prefectly for me. Thanks for writing this up

[Yacine Rouizi]

sudo apt install pm-utils then sudo pm-suspend worked for me! Thank you