HP G62 wake-from-sleep issues

[rjvbb]

Hello,

We have an "old" HP G62 (model A52 I think) laptop that's been running fine under 14.04LTS using either the official 3.13 kernels or a home-built 3.14 kernel (currently 3.14.53). It's my partner's work machine, on which she prepares her teaching materials (Google Chrome & LibreOffice) and watches streaming TV (Flash and/or HTML5 in Google Chrome).

Since last week it has developed an issue at wake-from-sleep; either the process doesn't complete leaving the machine locked on a black screen with no other solution but to power-cycle it. Or else its KDE4/X11 session will lock up (except for the mouse pointer), in which case it is usually possible to ssh in and do a shutdown -r.

Any idea what this can be? A hardware component that is going south? Or a software update, most likely in Chrome/Flash that causes instability in the Radeon driver? The second form of lock-up looks a lot like what I see from time to time with OS X, where Flash can also lead to a situation where the mouse still moves but the machine is blocked for the rest (and in that case, suspending it will also lead to a wake-to-black-screen.

I'd love to try a different graphics driver, but the proprietary Radeon driver is seriously out of date and won't work with the current Xorg server, AFAIK.

> lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] RS880 Host Bridge
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (ext gfx port 0)
00:05.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 1)
00:07.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 3)
00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
00:12.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:12.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 41)
00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)
00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 LPC host controller (rev 40)
00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge (rev 40)
00:16.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:16.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor HyperTransport Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Miscellaneous Control
00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Link Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4350/4550]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series]
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 02)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

[vinnywright]

Power cycling is never very good, have you tried the Magic Keys?

Press simultaneous Alt+SysRq plus one after the other with at least a second in between (that's three keys at a time):
R E I S U B

(Remember Hans Reiser?)
This will shut down the computer in a slightly more controlled fashion.

actually the firs three of thos options (R,E,and I)are deprecated all that is requeierd now is the (S,U,B) S=emergence sink U=emergence remount ro B=emergence reboot.

VINNY