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Suspend on Dell XPS M1210 (2.6.18-rc4 + Suspend2)

August 27th, 2006

Got a Dell XPS M1210, dual core 2.17GHz processor.

Compiled 2.6.18-rc4 with Suspend2 patches. Hibernate works fine, as well as suspend-to-ram… That is, as long as I don’t use the nVIDIA proprietary driver. With the “nv” driver it works fine, although the cursor does weird things.

It’s pretty clear that the nVIDIA driver is causing this. The issue is that nVIDIA drivers are unreliable when used on a laptop where suspending (and subsequent resuming) is quite an important feature.

Some (that would be nVIDIA) say the binary blob driver relies very closely on the ABI of the kernel and is thus very sensitive to bugs or subtle changes of the ABI from one kernel version to the other.

I say it’s a weak argument. This dependency can easily be circumvented by releasing proper open source drivers, or writing a more robust wrapper around the blob. Either that, or speed up the updates, guys! I currently have to choose between using TwinView and 3D acceleration on one hand, and the ability to suspend and resume on the other. It’s tough… :-(