What's Chris been doing?

Following George’s comment that it looked to him like amd that was hanging rather than ntp, I’ve switched round the order of the resume hooks so that ntp should start up before amd. That way hopefully amd will start up with a sensible date/time. I’ve not seen the amd component failing to start up before and I haven’t seen the clock going haywire before either, so I’m hoping that the one was the cause of the other. We’ll see if it happens again.

Meanwhile, the very next time the test 755 went to sleep it also didn’t wake up. This time it didn’t seem to be hung in the same way: the last time it happened the client component was managing to report back to the LCFG server, and I could ping the machine, but this time the machine’s LCFG status page reported

Last acknowledgement: 29/05/09 17:50:24

and ping returned “destination unreachable”.

Saving the log files and rebooting, this is what /var/log/pm/suspend.log says this time:

Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running suspend hooks.
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00clear =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/05led =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/15_915resolution =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/20video =====
kernel.acpi_video_flags = 0
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/49bluetooth =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/50modules =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/55battery =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/60sysfont =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/65alsa =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/94cpufreq =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95led =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:03 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/98lcfgsleep =====
===== Fri May 29 18:00:09 BST 2009: running hook: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video =====
Fri May 29 18:00:09 BST 2009: done running suspend hooks.

So all the suspend hooks ran successfully, but then – it hung? When I got to it this morning the machine wasn’t sleeping, as the power button wasn’t flashing, so it’s not simply a case of it not waking up on cue. The power button was solidly on, which is the case when the machine is either hung or running normally. And it wasn’t running normally…

Meanwhile I’ve been trying to upgrade the bios on the test 755. I’ve been trying the method described in the Dell Linux wiki but when I reboot it says that it can’t find the bios.hdr file I’ve loaded in memory.

I think I need to do a “warm boot” rather than the usual (apparently) “cold” one.
The instructions tell you to add “reboot=bios” to the end of your kernel command line, then reboot, then try loading your bios.hdr again then rebooting (when the actual upgrade will then happen). Tried that, get the “can’t find your bios.hdr in memory” message.

Perhaps I should have edited the kernel command line rather than appended to it? Maybe I’ll try that tomorrow.