ACPI (S4) suspend issue on Nvidia 7400 Geforce Go on Dell D820

[Madhusudan Singh]

Hello,

	I purchased a Dell D820 from Dell Outlet late last year and it initially came 
with an Intel 955GM chip on the system board. First thing I did was to 
decline the EULA (shipped with that Microsoft XP Professional crap) and wipe 
it clean of the Windows infection. Maybe I will get a Microsoft Tax refund, 
maybe I won't. Anyways, that is besides the point. Installed Debian Testing. 
I still use a system which is mostly Debian Testing, with some packages from 
sid.

	Owing to certain AC adaptor and other problems the laptop began to show, the 
system board was replaced by Dell (under my warranty plan) in February this 
year. The new system board had an Nvidia 7400 Geforce Go PCI-E video card 
(this is different apparently from the vanilla Nvidia 7400 Geforce Go card as 
it does not have AGP hardware).

	I am trying to get suspend to RAM and suspend to disk working on this laptop. 
First, I tried my luck with 8776 drivers, on kernels 2.6.19-21 with Nigel 
Cunningham's suspend2 patch. Suspend to disk always resulted in a hung system 
with no disk activity and only the power LED and bluetooth lights on (call 
this scenario A). Suspend to disk works if I use either the open source nv 
driver (which sucks because it does not have acceleration) or shut down X and 
suspend to disk from the command line (in VT1 for instance).

	Suspend to RAM works perfectly. I then tried driver versions 9631, 9755 and 
the latest beta drivers in quick succession. With kernel versions 2.6.20-21. 
No luck. Tried to do this without the suspend2 patch but with in-kernel 
suspend. No luck.

	Then I went back to Debian's vanilla kernel 2.6.18-4-686 (no suspend2 patches 
but with the in-kernel suspend capability) with the last two mentioned driver 
versions and tried suspend to disk again. It again results in scenario A. 

	Nvidia's drivers support suspend to RAM (S3) and suspend to disk (S4).

	I have asked this question extensively on nvnews forum and the nvidia 
engineers there tell me that they only supply the specs of their chips to the 
OEMs and many a time, OEMs make some changes. I do not know if it is true, 
but a lot of people there with Dell and ASUS laptops with the same hardware 
configuration (or similar) are having precisely the same issue.

	I was wondering if anyone using a Dell laptop with nvidia has ever been able 
to get suspend to disk working. I found one guy on nvnews who claimed he had 
a working suspend to disk with a Dell desktop with an nvidia 8800 card, but 
that is different hardware.

Thanks.