This flowchart depicts the process that powerd's Suspender class follows to suspend and resume a Chrome OS system:
Yellow boxes indicates states where powerd's event loop is running, white ovals indicate discrete tasks that are performed, and arrows indicate events or other occurrences that result in changes to the state.
The process begins when powerd (or some other process) decides that the system should be suspended. Suspender receives a request to suspend the system and generates an ID corresponding to the request. It performs pre-suspend preparation, such as muting audio and turning off the panel backlight. Then, it emits a SuspendImminent D-Bus signal to announce the suspend request to other processes (particularly ones that have registered suspend delays). The SuspendDelayController class is used to track the state of suspend delays.
After all suspend delays have become ready or have timed out, powerd starts a suspend attempt. This involves using powerd_setuid_helper to run the powerd_suspend script as root; this script is responsible for writing mem, freeze, or disk to /sys/power/state (the actual act that tells the kernel to suspend). If powerd_suspend reports that the system suspended and resumed successfully, then the pre-suspend preparations are undone, a SuspendDone D-Bus signal is emitted to inform other process that the suspend request is complete, and Suspender is ready for the next suspend request.
If the suspend attempt fails, Suspender waits for ten seconds before running powerd_suspend again to retry. After ten failed retries, the system is shut down.
The display state for suspend is controlled by Chrome for suspend.
The kernel provides a [/sys/power/wakeup_count] file that can be used to avoid races while suspending. Drivers within the kernel increment this count in response to user activity like keyboard or touchpad events.
powerd_suspend script is run to suspend the system, it writes the previously-read count back to the wakeup_count file. If the number that it writes doesn‘t match the kernel’s current count, the kernel reports failure, which results in powerd_suspend reporting failure, which results in the suspend attempt failing.powerd_suspend writes to /sys/power/state, the kernel again reports failure if the wakeup count has changed since powerd_suspend wrote to it.This has the effect of letting suspend attempts get aborted if user activity is observed by the kernel after the point at which the userspace powerd process starts suspending the system.
powerd's RequestSuspend D-Bus method takes an optional externally-supplied wakeup count. If a count is passed, powerd uses it instead of reading the wakeup_count file. autotests exercising the suspend path typically pass a count after installing a RTC wake alarm to trigger a resume several seconds after suspending. If powerd sees a count mismatch, it aborts the suspend request immediately. If it instead retried it ten seconds later, the retry would probably occur after the wake alarm had fired, resulting in the system sleeping forever.
IPC mechanisms such as FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) create issues for the freeze step in the kernel. This is because the framework holds onto kernel locks while waiting on a userspace process. A task can‘t freeze while it’s holding onto one of these locks. To address this, we impose an ordering on freeze in userspace utilizing cgroup freezers. Only the children of the root freezer can be ordered.
suspend_freezer_deps_<cgroup name>. These files contain one dependency per line for the cgroup. For instance, if the cgroups A, B, and C exist (located in /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer/ as directories A, B, and C), and A depends on B and C, there will be a pref file named suspend_freezer_deps_A that contains the contents:B
C
This will cause cgroup A to freeze before cgroups B and C.
/usr/share/power_manager/ by the ebuild for that program.start on starting system-services. The ownership of the freezer.state file should be set to power:power./sys/fs/cgroup/freezer/<cgroup>/cgroup.procs.On some systems, powerd passes a duration to the kernel in order to periodically wake the system from the S3 state. This results in an awake-with-the-display-off-and-audio-muted mode referred to as “dark resume”. After the system wakes into dark resume, powerd checks the battery level. If it is low enough to suggest that the battery will be drained entirely while in S3, resulting in a system that can‘t be used until it’s recharged, powerd shuts down the system. Otherwise, it re-suspends immediately.
On some systems, instead of shutting down after a certain amount of time as described above, the system may opt to suspend to disk instead (AKA hibernate). Hibernate represents a compromise between staying in suspend and shutting down. User state is perfectly preserved, much like a regular suspend, and power usage is identical to shutdown. The cost of this power savings is additional latency at resume, expected to be similar in latency to a fresh boot.
Enabling console messages during suspend can help in debugging kernel panics during suspend. By default console is enabled during system suspends to S3. But if S0iX is enabled, console is disabled by default as console activity on the UART can prevent system from suspending. To enable console temporarily for debugging S0iX, perform the following steps
# echo 1 > /var/lib/power_manager/enable_console_during_suspend # restart powerd
Please look at power states documentation for info on suspend modes. If suspend_to_idle preference is set then suspend mode is defaulted to ‘s2idle’. Otherwise suspend mode can be configured using suspend_mode preference. Currently valid suspend modes are s2idle, shallow and deep. To configure suspend mode temporarily for debugging, perform the following steps
# echo mode > /var/lib/power_manager/suspend_mode # restart powerd
Note that if suspend_to_idle is enabled, suspend_mode preference will not matter.
powerd will avoid suspending (or shutting down) if it believes that the firmware is being updated. After seeing the presence of a lockfile in /run/lock/power_override, powerd will act as if the suspend attempt failed and retry it later. Files in this directory are created by various programs including flashrom and battery_tool. There are additional details on the flashrom page.
On certain platforms, external displays may undergo momentary disconnects. For example, when a display is connected to a Thunderbolt 3 dock, an alternate mode switch occurs during session state changes like while logging in, which causes a switch from DisplayPort alternate mode to tunneled DisplayPort.
When in docked mode i.e with the lid closed, the system make take the momentary disconnection to be an opportunity to enter system suspend. That may have unwanted outcomes; in the case outlined above, it will result in the system landing up on a lock screen immediately after entering in the login credentials.
To avoid this, we use a preference termed defer-external-display-timeout which extends the amount of time powerd waits after a display disconnect before triggering a system suspend, thus allowing momentarily disconnected external displays to get re-connected.
The value is specified in seconds, and its default is 0 (which disables it).