Gentoo / EEE PC - Black Screen on Resume

I have been struggling with a bit of a productivity problem involving my EEE PC - I can't resume after suspending to ram (i.e. ACPI S3 sleep). All that I get is a black screen. I wish I had another machine to use to SSH in to the EEE, but my old work laptop has once again died. That is entirely another story but basically revolves around poor quality.

Using the ACPI S3 sleep state is actually not an uncommon problem with Linux end users, particularly the non-Ubuntu brand. I have to hand it to Ubuntu in that almost every machine I've ever owned has been properly detected and configured automatically. Getting a bug fixed is a bit more difficult, but whatever.

As many of you know, I use Gentoo almost exclusively on my EEE and Gentoo is historically one of the most difficult platforms to tweak. Gentoo has started offering only stage3 tarballs to get users off to a start, but when I began with Gentoo, they offered stage1 and stage2 tarballs, where building the compiler and baselayout from scratch was part of the installation routine.

The next generation of Gentoo-based distros sometimes offer what is called a stage4 tarball. A stage4 tarball is an entire pre-compiled root image and desktop environment, plus all of the tweaks and additional software necessary to exploit all of the capabilities of the hardware.

In my opinion, the stage4 scene is really lacking with Gentoo. Likewise with binary packaging. If there was a stage4 tarball publicly available for the EEE PC, then there would be thousands more users converted over, I'm sure. The same goes for the Maemo devices. The entire ultra-portable market is full of hardware that has unique specifications and tweaks. If Linux distributions don't start packaging the tweaks, then they'll find themselves falling behind the competition.

So far, I've found a few sites that have clearly explained things relating to building software for the EEE PC - one is by Nathan Coulson, and the other two are slightly outdated.

So the EEE PC model 702 (8GB SSD) has an intel 915 mobile graphics controller on the PCI bus. I would assume that this is the root of the issue when it comes to restoring the black screen after suspend / resume.

I've tried vbetool and saving / restoring /proc/bus/pci/00/02.0 to /tmp/video_state, but neither of those approaches has fixed the problem. Some Gentoo users have reported that the hibernate script works by default so that is my next option to try that out.

I thought I'd post the issue here - if you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment.

In the mean time, I wanted to post my eee overlay. Note that many things with linux-2.6.26 already obselete what is in the overlay, such as the atheros driver, atl2, all of the EEE PC platform-specific fixups, etc. Here is a pretty comprehensive 2.6.26 changelog.

If you feel like using my eee overlay, then you can either directly download the tarball or use layman with

layman -o http://virtb.visibleassets.com:2080/layman.conf -a eee

The overlay contains:

• sys-kernel
  
  • asus-acpi (asus acpi module for /proc/acpi/asus)
  • eee-sources (The same patches for 2.6.23 brought forward to 2.6.24)
  • eeepc-linux (the eee module which allows users to overclock their FSB)
• net-wireless
  
  • madwifi-ng (atheros madwifi driver)
  • madwifi-ng-tools (tools specifically for the driver)
• app-laptop
  
  • eee-acpi (a collection of scripts for acpi events - currently only eee-suspend and eee-video are disabled)
• x11-apps
  
  • asusosd (ASUS On-Screen-Display for hotkey events)

Aside from the overlay, I also have a binary package repository at http://virtb.visibleassets.com:2080/geeentoo/packages/All . If you feel like using any of my binary packages, then prefix your emerge command with:

export ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="**"
export EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="-K"
export PORTAGE_BINHOST="http://virtb.visibleassets.com:2080/geeentoo/packages/All"
export FEATURES="getbinpkg"
emerge -av1 asusosd

Please help fix my Black-Screen-Of-Death !!