Lucid: sleep / resume / alsa error causes system damage

[Sb]

Hello, I run Kubuntu 10.04 on an Acer 4810T Centrino laptop with Intel-everything compents. I have a major bug to report that cost me several hours of lost productivity yesterday. Here are the approximate steps:

1. I was listening to music with Smplayer.
2. I suspended my laptop (to RAM) without shutting off Smplayer
3. I came back a few hours later, resumed the laptop
4. Immediately upon resuming the laptop started to play "broken record" garbled screeching noise at full volume from the speakers
5. I couldn't login (screen locked from suspend), there was just a black screen, and I couldn't control my computer at all or kill the process. After about 30 seconds I was afraid my speakers would be ruined and I couldn't stand the noise anymore, so I did a hard power-off.
6. Upon reboot, I logged into my KDE desktop, and the network-manager-kde would not connect, when I clicked on the tray icon it said "Network Management Disabled".
7. I tried restarting NetworkManager service many times, rebooting the computer many times, and even re-installing the network-manager-kde package, but it refused to work, insisting that "Network Management Disabled".
8. I finally had to look up instructions to connect to the network via command line and uninstall and reinstall the whole network-manager stack of packages to regain GUI network management

This is a MAJOR meltdown of a system that is supposed to be a reliable "long term service" release. It indicates a failure on so many levels that I don't even know which package to file this bug against. ALSA should have been stopped during the suspend process. The system should not be brought down by a runaway process. And at any rate the NetworkManager stack should be failsafe so as not to be destroyed in the case of an unclean shutdown. If I didn't have several years of Linux experience under my belt I would have been forced to re-install the entire system.

Thanks for the help with this bug, let me know if you need more information please.

[Belfry (es4477)]

As a workaround you may want to try this script in /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/02Alsa and chmod 755 it. The second version is for a Xubuntu installation to restore the volume panel icon--maybe it can be modified for Kubuntu if you lose your panel icon.

#!/bin/sh
[ -f /sbin/alsa ] || exit $NA
case "$1" in
 hibernate|suspend)
  ;;
 thaw|resume)
  /sbin/alsa force-reload
  ;;
 *) exit $NA
  ;;
esac

#! /bin/sh
[ -f /sbin/alsa ] || exit $NA
XUSER=`finger| grep -m1 ":0" | awk '{print $1}'`
export DISPLAY=:0.0
export XAUTHORITY=$(find /var/run/gdm -type d -name auth-for-$XUSER-*)/database
case "$1" in
 hibernate|suspend)
  su ${XUSER} -l -c 'xfce4-panel -x' &
  ;;
 thaw|resume)
  /sbin/alsa force-reload
  su ${XUSER} -l -c xfce4-panel &
  ;;
 *) exit $NA
  ;;
esac

[Sb (sb56637)]

Thanks Belfry. I'll try the script.

Can we get this assigned to somebody please? I can't believe that a LTS release could be so incredibly unstable. I have experienced many, many total crashes when suspending my laptop because some random sound program didn't close properly and left mplayer or gstreamer or something running using the sound system that the proceeded to TOTALLY crash the entire system upon sleep. And many times my entire networking system has been hosed, as I described above. No user should ever be required to hack suspend scripts to prevent system damage.

[Sb (sb56637)]

OK, quick update, I am using the alsa suspend script, but it still makes no difference, I just had my system go haywire because mplayer was still running when I suspended. Unbelievably bad behavior from a LTS release.

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

@Sb, please do not confirm your own reports. I have reassigned your issue to linux kernel package and also suscribed ubuntu-audio team for now, Thanks.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

This network symptom is fairly unlikely to be caused by anything in the sound stack. At least there is no concept of "ALSA should have been stopped" short of unloading the sound modules prior to suspend (cf. /sbin/alsa force-unload) -- note that unloading the driver obliterates the sound stack's state irrevocably -- but I'll temporarily triage this bug against alsa-driver so that we can collect dmesg and sound hardware information more easily from you. You'll need to use "apport-collect 591727".

[Sb (sb56637)]

Thanks for the help.

Hmmm apport doesn't work for me...

user@4810T:~$ apport-collect 591727
Error connecting to Launchpad: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: '/home/user/.launchpadlib'
You can reset the credentials by removing the file "/home/user/.cache/apport/launchpad.credentials"

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for alsa-driver (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]