[Discuss] xorg doesn't wake up nicely from sleep/hibernation on lenovo edge e420 (intel i915)

[Seth Gordon]

My wife’s Linux laptop is on the brink of failure¹, so we bought a new 
one, a Lenovo Edge E420 which uses the Intel i915 graphics chipset, and 
I installed Debian stable on it (because she won’t put up with the new 
Ubuntu interface). I installed a backported 3.2.0 kernel because the 
2.6.32 kernel doesn’t play nicely with the laptop’s wireless card. Now I 
am stuck trying to figure out a problem with the video.

When the laptop goes into sleep mode and is woken up, or when it goes 
into hibernate mode and then reboots, *and* when a user is logged in, 
the X display is effectively frozen. The mouse pointer moves, but there 
is no visible response to clicks or keyboard activity. *However*, if, 
say, I click on a menu in the frozen screen, then hit ctrl-alt-f9 to go 
to a different virtual display, and then ctrl-alt-f8 to go back to the 
desktop, I see the effects of whatever I clicked on the screen.

I can go to a text console with ctrl-alt-f[1-6], and from there, if I 
send SYSHUP to the xorg process or “service gdm3 restart”, I am back to 
the login screen.

The page 
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_display_remaining_black_after_resume 
describes a bug *somewhat* like what I am dealing with, but not exactly, 
and seems to be covering earlier ThinkPad models and earlier Linux 
kernels. I did try putting “DISPLAY_QUIRK_S3_BIOS="true"” in 
/etc/pm/config.d/config, which had no visible effect. Shutting off DKMS 
made X not start at all (instead I got a flickering underscore cursor in 
the upper left of the screen).

I considered upgrading the whole system from debian-stable to 
debian-testing, but looking at the changelog for 
xserver-xorg-video-intel, I didn’t see anything mentioning hibernation 
or ACPI, so I am not sure that will actually help me.

Does anyone have any ideas about what to tweak, or at least, what other 
terms to Google for?

¹Aside from its general obsolescence—the CPU is so slow by modern 
standards that she can’t have Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice open 
at the same time—the “z” and “r” keys are failing. I pointed out that 
she could use Unicode escape sequences to work around the bad letters, 
but for some reason she didn’t thank me for this sage advice.