HP G62 wake-from-sleep issues

[rjvbb]

Hello,

We have an "old" HP G62 (model A52 I think) laptop that's been running fine under 14.04LTS using either the official 3.13 kernels or a home-built 3.14 kernel (currently 3.14.53). It's my partner's work machine, on which she prepares her teaching materials (Google Chrome & LibreOffice) and watches streaming TV (Flash and/or HTML5 in Google Chrome).

Since last week it has developed an issue at wake-from-sleep; either the process doesn't complete leaving the machine locked on a black screen with no other solution but to power-cycle it. Or else its KDE4/X11 session will lock up (except for the mouse pointer), in which case it is usually possible to ssh in and do a shutdown -r.

Any idea what this can be? A hardware component that is going south? Or a software update, most likely in Chrome/Flash that causes instability in the Radeon driver? The second form of lock-up looks a lot like what I see from time to time with OS X, where Flash can also lead to a situation where the mouse still moves but the machine is blocked for the rest (and in that case, suspending it will also lead to a wake-to-black-screen.

I'd love to try a different graphics driver, but the proprietary Radeon driver is seriously out of date and won't work with the current Xorg server, AFAIK.

> lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] RS880 Host Bridge
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (ext gfx port 0)
00:05.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 1)
00:07.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 3)
00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
00:12.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:12.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 41)
00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)
00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 LPC host controller (rev 40)
00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge (rev 40)
00:16.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:16.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor HyperTransport Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Miscellaneous Control
00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Link Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4350/4550]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series]
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 02)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

[Teunis]

I don't know what is causing your problems, make sure you do your regular updates and hope it will soon be fixed.
And don't use the sleep function.

Power cycling is never very good, have you tried the Magic Keys?

Press simultaneous Alt+SysRq plus one after the other with at least a second in between (that's three keys at a time):
R E I S U B

(Remember Hans Reiser?)
This will shut down the computer in a slightly more controlled fashion.

Chrome should use Googles own version of Flash which is far more up to date than what say Firefox would get.
For Firefox you can install browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash and it'll use Google Chrome's Flash.

[vinnywright]

Power cycling is never very good, have you tried the Magic Keys?

Press simultaneous Alt+SysRq plus one after the other with at least a second in between (that's three keys at a time):
R E I S U B

(Remember Hans Reiser?)
This will shut down the computer in a slightly more controlled fashion.

actually the firs three of thos options (R,E,and I)are deprecated all that is requeierd now is the (S,U,B) S=emergence sink U=emergence remount ro B=emergence reboot.

VINNY

[Teunis]

Thanks for mentioning vinny, for a while I thought it had to do with the status of my system.