How to fix suspend / wake

[pandeiro]

Currently suspend works but when woken, the laptop screen and cover light come on and immediately go dark, leaving the computer working but difficult/impossible to use.

It would be nice to include instructions for how to fix this.

[bandali]

@pandeiro I think we have mba6x_bl (by @patjak) for this.

However, there's an issue I (and I think everyone else using this) have, and that's using this backlight driver, the screen is dark on startup. And this is weird, because the initial brightness is supposed to be 150.

Also, since this driver creates a custom device (/sys/class/backlight/mba6x_backlight), it's not recognized by default for saving and loading the brightness value.

So, I've tried to write a systemd unit file (here) based on the [email protected] for doing that, but it's failing on me for some reason 😞

Can you help with this? If we get this going, I'll gladly submit a PR.

[dnohales]

FYI, I copy here the related upstream ticket:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67454

[pandeiro]

@aminb Apologies for not getting back to you. I only have limited access to a Macbook Air presently so I'm hesitant to jump in and vouch for any particular solution without being able to test it myself. @eagleoneraptor Thanks for the link. Hopefully there will be a conclusive fix for this soon?

[dnohales]

@pandeiro I hope so, but I'm following the upstream ticket since Linux 3.12.9 and we have no solution yet. I used to have mba6x_bl module installed too, it's better than nothing, but it's not perfect.

Anyway, I'm planning to install ArchLinux on my MBA again in these days and I can tell you how is going and maybe we can add a note to this issue in the tutorial.

[bandali]

@pandeiro No problems. In the mean time, I've found out that mba6x_bl works nicely and since I also use Powerdown it automatically sets brightness on startup and when plugging/unplugging from AC, I haven't had any issues recently. Feel free to add it to the README if you want.

@eagleoneraptor Yeah it's been forever sigh but at least we have mba6x_bl, which is much better than nothing.

[fszf]

Add i915 to modules and rebuild mkcpinit. That should prevent the black screen on boot. And use mba6x. Done n done.

[WhyNotHugo]

FWIW, the mba6x_bl-dkms package includes a few workarounds for the above mentioned issues.

[pandeiro]

Thanks @hobarrera, for this and for much of the information in this repo, which was derived from your prior work.