6 Suspend with Nvidia Graphic Cards

To use suspend with the binary only driver for NVidia graphics cards, you need to take some extra precautions. Note that this apparently does not work on all NVidia graphics chipsets, YMMV:

• download the NVidia driver with Yast Online Update, configure the card for 3D with sax2. You might need a fairly recent version of the NVidia driver, i tested with version 1.0.7167. Reading the nvidia-installer-howto from http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html is highly recommended.
• put the line
  Option "NvAgp" "1"
  in the Device section, under 'Vendor Name "NVidia"'
• do not load the vendor-agp module. To ensure this, remove any reference to the AGP modules from /etc/sysconfig/hardware:

  
  # cd /etc/sysconfig/hardware
  # grep agp *
  hwcfg-vpid-8086-3340:MODULE_0='intel-agp'
  

  now edit the file "hwcfg-vpid-8086-3340" (the one found with the grep command) and change "STARTMODE='auto'" to "STARTMODE='manual'". You might also want to remove the line "# HOTPLUG-FLAG: autocreated" to make this configuration persist future updates.

• reboot, make sure that the agp module is no longer loaded by running

  
  # lsmod | grep agp
  there should be no vendor-agp module (e.g. intel-agp, sis-agp,...) listed, only "agpgart".

AGP support will only work with chipsets, which are supported by the nvidia kernel module. Otherwise AGP support is simply disabled. Check this with "cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status". If there is no line "Status: Enabled", then AGP support is not available. The graphics card will work without AGP, but performance will be bad.

Note that during suspend to disk, when the drivers get suspended, the display is switched off (and on notebooks this means also the backlight) but it is not switched back on when the drivers are resumed to write the image. This means that you will not see any progress indicator during suspend and if suspend fails (it should not :-) you will not see any error. There is not much we can do about this right now, just wait until the disk stops writing and the machine turns itself off. After resume from suspend, the driver is resumed correctly and the display and backlight is turned back on.

This was tested on a SONY VAIO PCG-GRT995MP and a Dell D800 with both suspend to disk and RAM. It did not work on an older Dell Inspiron 8200.