power management - hibernation key(s)

I recently encountered a HP Pavilion for which a good friend wanted hibernation capacity. Ideally, hibernation would result from an idle state (eg., when a user steps away from their system for a number of minutes) and/or when hibernation was selected by the user (a menu item or a hotkey). The process gave me a chance to step through key bindings and power management configuration.

overview

I expected hibernation to really be two functions - hibernation, and resuming from hibernation, equally important. And both could have subsections which might include: 1) hardware settings (eg. having a swap file for suspending to a disk), 2) boot settings (eg. grub/lilo), 3) daemon settings for whatever daemon alerted the kernel (possibly many options), 4) key bindings 5) inactivity time-out.
NB: Currently having hardware issues with full hibernation, so this entry ends with "suspending". Upgrade to full hibernation downstream.

1. swap

For hibernation, a swap partition is the easiest, though supposedly a swap file can be configured with enough work. I checked in cfdisk, and noted that my friend had more than two gigs of swap partition on /dev/sda2. /Etc/fstab was properly configured as well. Otherwise, mkswap and swapon, possibly followed by a fresh genfstab, would be accomplished in this step.

2. boot

This guy is running ArchLinux with grub, so I looked here, followed by:

# nano /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=/dev/sda2"

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I got a couple of errors when updating grub, thanks apparently to this bug, but these cleared with an update to his system (pacman -Syu) the following day.

3. daemon

What to use to notify the kernel? Certainly, acpid and/or pm-utils are what most will choose. However, it's not necessary in this case. Arch's use of systemd already handles some power events without another daemon. Per this helpful page, I changed the login process, uncommenting the relevant hibernation line and restarting systemd:

# nano /etc/systemd/logind.conf
HandleHibernateKey=hibernate

# systemctl restart systemd-logind

No other daemons than systemd are needed with systemd installed. What's accomplished at this step is hibernate service enablement, but not activation. To activate through systemd we need a systemd service file telling it what to do, possibly a cron job, and possibly a key binding. Properly configured, the command to initiate hibernation is $ systemctl hibernate, and for suspension $ systemctl suspend. Select one of these to go through the configuration steps -- binding to a key, possibly, to a cron job, possibly a systemd service file, etc.

3a. privileges

One expects privilege confusion with users taking daemon actions, so a check of group membership is wise. On the other hand, according to this page about systemd, polkit is required for user privileges to run hibernation or suspend --- adding users to groups such as "disk" can actually cause conflicts. YMMV, it appears. In lieu of polkit, simply granting ourselves a specific privilege in /etc/sudoers, eg "username ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/systemctl", also should work.

4. keys

A non-standard KB-0630 enhanced keyboard with a separate hibernation key, so pretty sweet. Per this page, installed xbindkeys and hit the hibernation key.

$ xbindkeys -k
[hit the hibernate key]
"(Scheme function)"
m:0x0 + c:150
XF86Sleep

$ nano .xbindkeysrc
# Suspend system
"systemctl suspend"
XF86Sleep

$ nano .xinitrc (or .icewm/startup)
xbindkeys &

5. idle time

# nano /etc/systemd/logind.conf
IdleAction=suspend
IdleActionSec=20min

# systemctl restart systemd-logind

This worked, except that it would go to sleep in 20 minutes, idle or not.