Hibernate and Restriced Drivers (Was: 4 More days...)

[Paulus Esterhazy]

Hello developers,

> There's the decision to ship with a kernel that breaks
> suspend/resume on any machine using ATI proprietary drivers (and
> Nvidia I think, but by that point we'd rolled a custom kernel to fix
> the Ubuntu breakage).

This bug, or this group of bugs, will be a source of annoyance to many
users. Basically, when you use restricted drivers (both NVidia and ATI),
your system will fail to resume from hibernation most of the time. As
restricted drivers are enabled by default, this should be considered a
regression from feisty.

See for example #34043, which I think is still valid for most NVidia
users, or #151471 for a more recent incarnation. Sometimes, following
the instructions of:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaLaptopBinaryDriverSuspend

will help make it work, but often it doesn't. What this means is that
suspend won't work out of the box in Ubuntu any more. (And if you try
anyway it crashes, with the possibility of data loss). (See [1])

I hope this doesn't sound ungrateful. Ubuntu developers are doing a very
good job overall, and dealing with binary blobs isn't an easy task. It's
alright to know that something is broken right now, but it's worrying to
have the impression that no solution is in the offing at all. I'd love
to see some sort of Hibernation team created that tries to tackle the
problem in a systematic way.

Thanks
Paulus (who loves Gutsy otherwise)

[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=564658