power manager causing catastrophic powerfail

[W-barath-hotmail]

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/448702

When my laptop attempts to suspend itself to avoid powerfail, instead of successfully suspending, I get a popup from xfce4-power-manager: "Are you sure you want to hibernate the system? An application is currently disabling the automatic sleep. Doing this action now may damage the working state of this application."

How do I prevent applications from preventing suspend when battery is low?

$ dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.PowerManagement /org/freedesktop/PowerManagement/Inhibit org.freedesktop.PowerManagement.Inhibit.GetInhibitors
reveals:

freedesktop/PowerManagement/Inhibit org.freedesktop.PowerManagement.Inhibit.GetInhibitors method return time=1528483300.093042 sender=:1.35 -> destination=:1.96 serial=81 reply_serial=2 array [ string "/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser" ]

but sometimes there are others too.

Needless to say this is disastrous to my laptop's state of charge and battery health and results in recoverable filesystem corruption when these apps idiotically force the system to powerfail by prematurely depleting the battery and then preventing the life-saving suspend that would have prevented them losing state.

Ideally some of these applications should still be able to prevent suspend when the system is not low on battery, but I'd like be given an opportunity to permit that behaviour. It should never have been made a default setting that applications can overcome power management settings which are in place to protect the hardware and filesystem consistency!

This error ironically only occurs when running on battery. The system suspends fine 100% of the time when it is plugged in.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: xfce4-power-manager 1.6.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-22.24-generic 4.15.17
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-22-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Fri Jun 8 12:16:51 2018
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/xfce4-power-manager
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-05-08 (31 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180426)
LocalLibraries: /usr/local/lib/libffi.so.6.0.4
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_CA
 PATH=(custom, user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: xfce4-power-manager
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

I suggest forwarding this issue to the Xfce bug tracker.

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/inhibit/

>Inhibitor locks should not be misused. For example taking idle blocking locks without a very good reason might cause mobile devices to never auto-suspend. This can be quite detrimental for the battery.

There is bug 1600622 also.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[W-barath-hotmail (w-barath-hotmail)]

This bug isn't Gnome or XFCe4-specific. This bug affects the entire Ubuntu desktop ecosystem and should be a release-blocking bug because it causes physical damage to people's hardware and has security implications when it fails to lock as expected.