[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#320790: Hal won't halt on swsusp

[John Lindgren]

Somehow I lost or missed your email, so I apologize for the slow
response.

Yes, based on the various backtraces, it looks as though the kernel's
CDROM driver hangs up waiting for the drive, which in turn hangs up HAL,
which blocks the suspend.

I don't know anything about TuxOnIce; I use the /usr/sbin/s2disk
executable from Debian's uswsusp package. But other methods of
hibernating, like the simple "echo disk > /sys/power/state" -- as well
as low power suspend mode -- are also blocked by this. It looks as
though the kernel simply can't freeze while some program is in the
middle of a system call.

As for unloading the CDROM driver, that does work around the problem for
me. But I have to do it manually whenever I'm not using the drive,
before the hangup happens. In the Ubuntu user's case, the hangup
happened during the hibernate, so he could simply unload and reload the
driver before and after the hibernate. In my case, it seems to happen
when I leave the drive empty for a period of time.

A hardware problem with my drive probably is at the root of this.
Unfortunately, the drive is built into the laptop and can't be replaced.
It would seem reasonable to put some kind of timeout and hard reset into
the CDROM driver so that the whole system isn't affected by a hardware
problem with the CD drive.

If you ask me, this bug should be reassigned from HAL to the Linux
kernel.

John