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Vista an Uneasy Sleeper
Emmy King writes "
One thing we just can't wrap our mind about is the terrible, broken, and completely pitiful support for waking Vista up from a Deep Sleep or hibernation.Anytime you attempt to wake Vista up from Hibernation or "Deep Sleep" (S3-induced sleep mode), it dies. It's either a BSOD, or a driver error, or a broken network, no DWM, lack of sound... the list goes on, and on. So much for an operating system to "power" the future! (No pun intended!) That's with properly-signed drivers and no buggy software on multiple PCs..."
Linux: Ritalin for your new vista box
So which of those 9 shut-down options can we eliminate now? Probably all but the one that goes "shut the hell off"?
stuff |
S3 is plain old suspend/sleep. hibernate/deep sleep implies suspend to disk and total power down, and is S4. And the word S3-induced makes no sense, S3 is a state entered into, not an active thing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Each new release, each patch, each service pack I keep waiting for the perfect, all-right-I'll-settle-for-well-behaved advanced power control. I find this unsettling Vista may not deliver. One "feature" I always treasure in Windows systems is its "better" support for power control.
At least Windows with its more cozy relationship with chip and BIOS industry supposedly offers ACPI for fast "sleep" and "rewake" functionality. In fact that was my trick way to get ACPI for linux when it was really important by running a vmware install of linux within a well behaved windows (not always as well behaved as I'd have wished, but better than the problematic ACPI linux support).
And now, out of the gates (sic) Vista may not deliver? That's going to leave a mark. I'd considered getting a machine for educational purposes (since I do support for everyone I know), but I'd considered waiting for some of the initial bugs to get ironed out. I just didn't expect this big of an initial speedbump. Guess there's not much to do but wait for Microsoft to get it right, or close to right.
Also, I thought I'd read they were offering super-sized power control a la scheduled up and down times, etc. More vaporware?
I'm still amazed they get to skate on this kind of stuff.
So someone fucks it up and it's irrevocably broken? I've used both sleep and hibernate functions on my laptop since Vista was beta 1 and both have worked beautifully. Both features require decent support from the hardware, not just "signed drivers."
...I didn't know Vista was out yet. Thought it was still in the debuggng stage...
Or maybe I'm still sleeping and this is a dream. Vista released with major operational flaws. Now that's a Linux promotion!
I'd like to know where this completely bug free software comes from. The last completely bug-free software I saw was Hello World.
Once I went laptop-only, hibernating became the truth, the light and the way. Before that I never hibernated because I never shut the desktop off.
Interesting that TFA says Vista hibernated fine in beta but not in the release version. Oddly, Xp hibernated flawlessly on my laptop but openSuSE 10.1 hangs every time. No Linux distro hibernates this particular laptop (toshiba). We'll see if 10.2 will as soon as ATI gets done developing Vista drivers and gives us a driver for Xorg 7.2
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
It doesn't look to me like there was no pun intended...
It will happen.
I'm vociferously anti-MS; but in this case, I believe they deserve a small pardon. Go read the ACPI specifications sometime. You will cry and beg for mercy. ACPI is horrible. Considering the small number of requirements the real world has for such an interface, the specification is vast beyond imagining. Linux has also had long standing problems producing a proper ACPI layer, for this very reason: ACPI is a pig.
Now it is worth noting that MS themselves contributed to the development of this specification. The cynical side of me believes that confounding the competition by way of impenetrable specifications is simply Microsoft's modis operandi. Look at Microsoft's OpenXML specification for example: while in theory it meets the European requirement for documenting file formats and protocols, in practice it's ~6,000 pages will certainly confound all but the most determined attempts at interoperability. But here's the rub: Microsoft has to eat their own dog food, and they are suffering the consequences. Microsoft's operating system and applications are becoming so piggish that even Microsoft can't manage them.
Huh. I've got two systems here with Vista running on them, a Dell e1505 notebook and a not-as-new homebuilt Athlon X2 system, and on both of them both hibernate and sleep "Just Work." In fact, Vista's been less problematic in all areas than XP could ever dream of being.
They don't quite Bill's 6 second boot time either - but both systems clock in right around 10 seconds, and that's pretty hard to complain about.
It might be the end of the day, time to go home, huggle the wife and get some sleep and stuff? Nice to have everything the way you when tomorrow morning.comes. Or your server might need replacing the UPS. Hibernate is one easy way to get this done.
Just guessing, of course. I use hibernation every day with my Debian laptop.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
I've had fewer problems with my laptop since installing vista than I ever had with linux.
.. but vista sleeping and waking up works just fine.
... whereas it seems to work now in vista just fine?
Pretty much everything worked 'out-the-box' -- including video (although I ultimately had to go download the vista drivers from ATI to get any kind of acceleration), sound, even suspend/sleep (although, microsoft renaming hibernate to sleep confused me at first).
There are plenty of places where microsoft seems to suck across the board
BTW - this sleeping is a feature that I never did get 100% working properly in linux -- and what I WAS able to get working right required I bounce around a few websites ultimatly doing my own research
This feature works just great here, making it quite impossible it's due to Vista (unless my Vista is magic), but rather due to hardware drivers after all.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Those were no typos. I just destroyed you!!!
BTW, it's funny how the parent is flamebait, while replacing a few words makes you insightful. Moderators, make up your mind.
-Henry IV. Part II.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
S3 (Suspend) doesn't exactly work wonderfully under other operating systems either. It's highly dependant on the motherboard chipset being used, and all attached hardware.
I would be quicker to condem Microsoft if Linux (or FreeBSD preferably) could properly suspend and resume ANY of my systems properly. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.
FreeBSD-6.2 was the closest I got... If I pull out my videocard and use the onboard, it actually resumes successfully.
Though the onboard video (Savag) really blows, and I haven't yet found any version of X.org that doesn't regularly crash when using that particular driver.
And both the onboard nic, and my SBlive card stop working, and I have to manually reload the kernel module every time I resume...
And with all of those addeniums, that's the closest I've ever gotten to getting Suspend to work (and being forced to use the onboard video is a complete show-stopper). In fact, the latest snapshot of 7.0 was actually a downgrade, and wouldn't resume from S3 at all.
So the problem can't lie entirely with Microsoft (though they are partly to blame for the extremely lax and often Windows-centric ACPI practices). Hardware manufacturers bare a great deal of the responsibility for making their ACPI implimentations buggy as all hell to begin with... So much so that even Microsoft apparently can't even work-around it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
We currently have 4 systems running Vista RTM and a not one of them has any problem waking up from hibernate. They are a mix of P4, AMD XP, and Athlons.
We had Vista RC1 & 2 on other systems, both desktops & laptops, and they behaved perfectly as well.
They all respond perfectly to Wake-On-LAN too. I know this because our tape backup system sends WOL packets to the systems to do the backups.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
The bugs that always amaze me are the ones that seemingly would have been caught if anyone had ever actually tried the feature even once.
..."
..."
The only way I can account for something like this is that perhaps when a bug exhibits "protean symptoms" (fails in a different way every time), one could imagine in a completely bureaucratic, micromanaged corporate environment, instead of being registered as "this always fails," it could be registered as two hundred completely different bug descriptions, each specific description having been recorded only once and therefore judged by management to be unimportant.
"Fails with blue screen of death reading 0687FF13 618AC003
being regarded as a "different" bug from
"Fails with blue screen of death reading 31469B21 96CB2022
And before people start saying "blame the hardware," it's Microsoft's job to make sure that Vista does work on every PC certified for it. The days when DOS said "Toshiba DOS" or "PC-DOS" or "NEC DOS" are long gone. The name on the product is Microsoft WIndows and it's Microsoft's responsibility to see that it works.
It's Microsoft's choice whether to do this by making their code robust, or jawboning vendors at WinHEC, or pressuring vendors.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The pun was clearly intended, otherwise there would not have been quotation marks around 'power'.
Why can't we all just be honest about our use of puns? Puns are not always bad. There's no need to be ashamed of them.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
I just opened my laptop and turned it on, and it resumed from a hibernate just fine (running Vista Business release version). No blue screen, no network problems, it put me right back where I was before with a perfectly functional session. I hate Windows as much as every other Unix geek, but it sounds to me like this is a classic case of "not enough research" ... or if you prefer, "fud".
> Linux: It doesn't suck. Indeed. Ubuntu 6.10 wakes up from hibernation just fine, and quickly, even on my old computers. How hard can it be?
How hard? Very!
Linux has had 2 (3?) separate attempts to get hibernate support working properly and while it is pretty good now it still isn't perfect.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I am always uneasy when business customers ask about sleep, heres a few of the things which bug me
What happens with network applications (take google earth as an example - it connects and logs in at program start)?
How about a domain?
What happens if you go to sleep on one domain and wake up plugged into another?
What happens when you wake up outside the login hours?
What happens if your server slot is taken for an application (because you disconnected and someone else took it)?
What happens if you are editing a networked (word etc) document at the time, can people edit it whilst you are asleep?
Will your application pick up where it left off or display the edited document?
Its things like this which prevent us from recommending sleep or hibernate to our clients.
If the hibernate just allows the core OS to be brought up without problems then that doesn't help people who use their computers too much.
liqbase
...we wait for Vista SP1 before making the jump.
Also, because DX10 cards (and titles) will be ubiquitous by then.
Why do I have this urge to post the entire Monte Python "Dead Parrot" sketch?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
... the poster's blog is hosted on a Vista box, as it seems to have fallen asleep. Or been Slashdotted.
Anyhow, I've been running Vista RC1 since it was released (and the beta before that) and never had a problem with the sleep function. Other problems, yes, but none with sleep and none so bad I'd complain about them (mostly my preferences vs. Microsoft's, predictable stuff like that).
In fact, I was just telling my wife the other day (she just melts when I talk sweet to her like this) that the sleep/hibernate function in Vista is so much more stable than it used to be that I haven't actually had my laptop all the way off in a few weeks -- I just open and close it as needed, and it wakes right back up and grabs whatever network it sees. I never had this work so well with XP or W2K.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Windows Vista has been available to MSDN subscribers for a few weeks now. From Business Basic right up to Ultimate Edition, in both x86 and x64.
You can also press Alt, Super and Meta to see even more options such as doze, slumber, nap, snooze, relax, take a rest, nod off, or crash. I'm not sure what they do though.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Sleep is for girls, n00bs, and douchebags. The rest of us leave 'em up on all the time. And fuck laptops. If you need to write code on holiday then you're not a real developer. Real developers don't *go* on holiday.
Vista will be the best thing ever for third world countries. Do you realise how much PCs will become obsolete the moment it hits the shelves? A large percentage of those PC will be donated to aid organisations, who will install Ubuntu and ship them to Africa.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Vista is the only OS I've used that has ever been able to wake up from sleep and hibernate properly.
The OP makes it sound like their experience applies to everyone, so I have to call FUD on this.
At any rate, I have zero problems with these features, using Vista Home Ultimate 64 bit.
I've concluded that power management is just insanely tricky. APM/ACPI must be inconsistently implemented on every device, otherwise it could never work as poorly as it does.
ACPI does suck. It's a typical M$, "extensible," "do it in software" nightmare described in 500 pages of spec. It reminds me of nothing more than a winmodem. It will be hard even for careful hardware makers to follow and that's what M$ likes.
APM, on the other hand, worked well for laptops and still does if supported. I close the lid and it suspends. I open the lid and everything comes back. Yes, you have to unplug things still but I actually like that. That way, I can close the lid and have some boring operation still going without fear my cats will dance on the keyboard and screw it up. Other quirks are largely due to the fact that APM too is a M$ written "extensible" standard.
The funny thing about all of this is that free software will give you a working system but M$ never has. I've never seen a windoze user who can make good use of power management, despite all sorts of time wasted hunting down drivers and fiddling. At the same time, I've been enjoying multiple month uptime on my laptops for years. The non free way of making code work together is simply broken.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
reboots the system into windows?
Douglas P. Price
I prefer the way my PowerBook works. I close the lid and it goes to sleep. Open the lid and it comes back up and works perfectly every single time. I haven't turned the thing off since I bought it last year.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
but it sounds to me like this is a classic case of "not enough research"
A rather funny comment coming from someone who presumably tested one system and found it to work, so therefore all systems must work.
The article mentions that the author had problems with "deep sleep" on 6 of 8 systems.
So he's obviously not making the claim that hiberate/Deep Sleep is broken on ALL systems, since there were two he tested that worked correctly. 6 out of 8 is a pretty bad track record though, so it's likely that a significant amount of people are going to have problems with this feature. It's not a huge sample either, so maybe he's just unlucky enough to own systems where this feature doesn't work properly. I DO think it's a quite nice "heads up" to know about before before Vista becomes mainstream though.
I guess I can't be terribly surprised that hibernate/sleep is still broken though. It doesn't work properly under Windows 2000 on my circa 2002 desktop computer, but worked just fine on my Circa 1999 laptop.
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