Blank screen on suspend / resume, please teach me to troubleshoot

I just got a new ASUS - ROG Zephyrus 14" GA402RK laptop with the following specs:

WQXGA 120Hz Gaming Laptop - AMD Ryzen 9 - 16GB DDR5 Memory - AMD Radeon RX 6800S - 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD

This has both an integrated GPU and a dedicated one (the RX 6800S). So far it seems to run well however suspend / resume doesn’t work. The laptop will suspend just fine but resume results in the screen staying blank. It appears other parts of the computer wake up, the power LED changes from slow flashing to being solid again. The only thing I can do is to hold the power button to do a hard power cycle. I just download the latest version of Endevour OS as of 4/20/2022 and everything is updated running the 5.17.3-zen1-1-zen kernel (downloading to 5.17.4-zen1-1-zen as I type).

I’ve done a lot of digging into this including reading the Arch documents on suspend / resume. It seems this is one of those issues that can be very hardware dependent. What may work for one, doesn’t necessarily work for another, especially when the laptop is so new. Reading various thread posts, this type of issue is nothing new and it can be difficult to filter out what is relevant. My one major suspect item is the combination of integrated graphics and dedicated graphics. I am wondering if on suspend the kernel doesn’t know what card to activate. Just a hunch and I could be way off.

I don’t mind trying to hunt this down but I am at a loss on what commands I should use to troubleshoot since I have to hard reboot the computer. What log files should I be looking at and what commands after a hard reset will help me to focus on what is happening when I try to wake up the computer?

Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

journalctl -b -1

will provide the journal for the previous boot. There may be information towards the end.

Thanks, but will that show the log file for when it is resuming?

It will show the entire journal (“log”) for the boot. You can change the number passed to the -b flag to specify which specific boot process to look at, or just run journalctl by itself to view the entire journal.

Well worth trying the command to see what it does, rather than asking whether an answer to your question is an answer to your question.

1 Like

So it looks like an update to the latest kernel version 5.17.5 seems to have addressed the issue. Resume from suspend looks to be much more reliable now. I think this is more of an issue of such a new laptop and the software support catching up.

2 Likes