Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1290864
In Process
shiftux
Asked: 2020-11-10 04:08:30 +0800 CST

Dell XPS 13 sleep problems

  • 772

My computer drains a lot of battery when in sleep mode.

I've tried following the steps outlined in this bug report, tried the diagnosis layed out in this question and disabled the "sign of life" options in the BIOS as described here.

I confirmed my system sleeps in the s2idle state. Which I suspect is the problem.

$ sudo journalctl | grep "PM: suspend" | tail -2
May 13 18:41:00 mex kernel: PM: suspend entry (s2idle)
May 13 20:52:36 mex kernel: PM: suspend exit

However I have 2 issues when trying to follow the above guides: Firstly my /sys/power/mem_sleep file does not contain a deep option:

sudo cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
[s2idle]

And secondly I can't seem to edit the file to add a deep option:

$ echo deep | sudo tee /sys/power/mem_sleep
deep
tee: /sys/power/mem_sleep: Invalid argument
$ sudo sh -c 'echo deep > /sys/power/mem_sleep'
sh: 1: echo: echo: I/O error

Not being able to close the lid and have the laptop suspend is very annoying, I find... Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

OS: Ububntu 20.04, 5.8.0-26-generic / Hardware: Dell XPS 13 9310

suspend dell 20.04

1 Answers

  1. Welcome to askubuntu!

    I have asked a member of the Dell Linux team about this issue. I got the following answer: "XPS 9310 only offers Modern Standby for Windows and Suspend to Idle for Linux." This means deep sleep is not supported by the firmware on this machine.

    Furthermore it was noted that you should use the OEM kernel as it contains fixes for the power draw issue not yet upstream, though the fixes are expected to land upstream in Linux 5.10.

    So try to install linux-oem-20.04 as this should contain fixes. Let me know if the power draw is better :-).

    Edit: To try the Linux kernel from proposed, you could do the following:

    mkdir kernel-5.10 && cd kernel-5.10
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/l/linux-signed-oem-5.10/linux-image-5.10.0-1002-oem_5.10.0-1002.3_amd64.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/l/linux-oem-5.10/linux-headers-5.10.0-1002-oem_5.10.0-1002.3_amd64.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/l/linux-oem-5.10/linux-modules-5.10.0-1002-oem_5.10.0-1002.3_amd64.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/l/linux-oem-5.10/linux-oem-5.10-headers-5.10.0-1002_5.10.0-1002.3_all.deb
sudo apt install ./*.deb

    This set of commands creates a directory where the kernels are downloaded into from the official ubuntu proposed repos. Then apt asks for your permissions to install the packages.

    NOTE: If for some reason you fail to boot your system, choose advanced options when booting and select the old kernel and just remove the packages again you installed here. I tested those instructions on an older XPS system and it worked fine for me.

    Edit 2 Additional info for suspend to idle: The older XPS 9360 supports both deep sleep and suspend to idle. Since quite some time suspend to idle is configured default in Ubuntu for this machine. I've never actually used it though, I always went for classical deep sleep. Now I've tested it and it performs better than deep sleep on this machine: Waking up from suspend is very much faster and the power draw is roughly the same compared to deep sleep (around 2% in 8 hours).

    • 4