Modern laptops promise a kind of magic. Shut the lid or press the sleep button, toss it in a backpack, and hours, days, or weeks later, it should wake up as if nothing happened with little to no battery drain. This sounds like a fairly trivial operation — y’know, you’re literally just asking for the computer to do nothing — but in that quiet moment when the fans whir down, the screen turns dark, and your reflection stares back at you, your computer and all its little components are actually hard at work doing their bedtime routine.
↫ Aymeric Wibo at the FreeBSD Foundation
A look at how suspend and resume works in practice, from the perspective of FreeBSD. Considering FreeBSD’s laptop focus in recent times, not an unimportant subject.
It’s shocking how inconsistently hibernation features work across hardware. Even supported windows manufacturers often seem to struggle at it. My HP laptop provided by work WILL loose charge overnight if I physically close the laptop without telling it to shutdown first. I don’t remember it originally doing this when it was new running windows 8, but it’s absolutely buggy now running windows 11. I haven’t really allocated time to find out why it does this. Who knows, reinstalling everything might fix it, but it’s just a reminder how stuff is just too bloody complicated to just work.
I actually feel that putting computers to sleep is engineering around a problem that modern computers have no excuse for having these days: long boot times. Sleeping computers has become a crutch, not because we couldn’t engineer instant-on computers, but because society has normalized computers performing like molasses. Alas no single entity is really able to fix it because there are so many layers of bloat and antiquated practices from BIOS manufacturers, OS vendors, hardware bootstrap standards, all of which are highly sequential and mostly involve waiting for timeouts.
Engineers could clearly do better given the opportunity and (nearly) instant boot would be a killer feature, however it would imply throwing away antiquated PC standards that have benefited billions of users. I wouldn’t take that lightly; for all the faults, strong PC standards are what enable us to take nearly any off the shelf x86 hardware and run linux on it without asking the manufacturer for permission or support. I do like new innovation and instant boot certainly be a good feature in my book, but I’m always hesitant with non-standard solutions that risk sacrificing the other privileges grandfathered into PCs – like bring your own OS, right to repair/upgrade/service, etc. I’m not sure we’re ever going to see a new platform that’s as open as an x86 PC. I don’t know if there is a corporate will to design a more modern platform that is as open as x86 PCs are….My fear is that the manufactures would see a replacement as an opportunity to lock things down, taking more control away from owners 🙁
It’s as if vertical integration offers immense benefits to user experience. Apple can achieve a long battery life and flawless suspend and sleep on their laptops because they own the stack. Even in the Intel days, they got an off-the-shelf CPU and chipset from Intel, but they had full control over everything else and could optimize their OS just for 2-3 hardware configurations per model year.
At this point, if Microsoft wants to save Windows, they should provide a maximum of 10 hardware configurations that all OEMs have to use. This will also eliminate the driver mayhem, since Windows can ship will all the drivers for those 10 configurations bundled-in (so drivers are only needed for USB peripherals).
But that would take control from OEMs, so I don’t expect Microsoft will do that, which means that OEMs will keep sourcing components and UEFIs from the lowest bidder and the chaos will continue.
kurkosdr,
I find CPUs to be the least of the problem, it’s all the peripherals and chipsets that really end up making things hairy. For better or worse many manufacturers are guilty of not following the standards we have. Even intel are guilty of not consistently implementing energy standards in their own hardware.
https://community.intel.com/t5/Ethernet-Products/On-the-state-of-802-3az-with-Intel-X550/m-p/1364016
We have standards and they work, but its all for naught when manufacturers don’t bother implementing them 🙁
Apple PCs get away with not supporting much hardware because their vision is computers that don’t offer much in the way of customization, but that’s not a very good solution for PCs in general IMHO. I’m glad PCs are more open to hardware innovation, more choice is a good thing! I think we’re so lucky that there’s lots of viable manufacturers to choose from. I do not want my choices to be dictated to me like apple does! I can appreciate that the apple model may be fine for some, but it’s quite regressive for those who value innovation, competition, and openness.
I ultimately think that “more of the same” is the most likely path forward. A company like microsoft does have considerable reach to issue technical mandates to industry partners, however in the past they used their influence to peddle windows-centric interests rather than generic ones that would improve things for a linux user like me. For example, many microsoft certified computers no longer let owners jump into the bios without first having windows release control first.
I’ve already experienced a problem with an unbootable windows OS and needing to go into the BIOS but being unable to get there because windows wasn’t bootable. Fortunately I could remove the SSD to override microsoft’s BIOS lock, But with more computers having soldered storage, there may be fewer support options.