Dell Vostro 3500 with modern suspend S0 - fan is running, battery drain, overheating - how to disable and get back to S3 suspend?

I recently moved to a new laptop DELL Vostro 3500 and got stuck with the suspend. When trying to suspend in Ubuntu as usual, it looks like system went to suspend mode, but cpu fan runs even faster. This S0 suspend is unusable as the laptop overheats quickly in a bag and the battery is drained fast.

The last 24 hours I spent with searching and it must have to do with the "modern suspend", or the "connected suspend" and the S0 state. DELL Forums are full of complains and no solution is offered yet. This modern suspend is affecting many new laptops apparently.

Nevertheless there is some workaround in Windows 10 with adding extra keys to registry

reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power /v PlatformAoAcOverride /t REG_DWORD /d 0

and check with

powercfg /a

if the S0 is disabled and S3 enabled. On my system it has no effect.

Is there any similar Ubuntu way to control and choose between suspend states (S0, S3)?

In BIOS I found only some option to disable C-States, but they have no desired effect.

2 Answers

This dell community forum thread says it all

The S3 is disabled deliberately on firmware level.

$ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
[s2idle]

is missing the "deep" option and thus the GRUB directive

mem_sleep_default=deep

won't have any effect.

So until DELL releases some sane BIOS update which lets users decide on what suspend state they want to use S0 <> S3, I set up the hibernate function on 20.04 this way

and enabling the status power option "hibernate" like this

Hibernate button on ubuntu 20.04

with additional edits from the comments below:

Following the workaround from the FAQ.. copy paste the below content in the file /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/com.ubuntu.desktop.pkla

[Enable hibernate in upower]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
ResultActive=yes
[Enable hibernate in logind]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate;org.freedesktop.login1.handle-hibernate-key;org.freedesktop.login1;org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate-multiple-sessions;org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate-ignore-inhibit
ResultActive=yes

Reboot & Test

Hibernate works. My DELL Vostro won't melt even in a bag. The slight longer boot time is still fast enough thanks to SSD

Adding another observation after long time using hibernation.

Recently I changed my additional internal HDD for SSD and the suspend issues seem to be gone. No fan running after suspending. The power draining seems appropriate too while sleeping. Battery percentage drops only abount 10% in 8hrs sleep.

So the suspend and fan issue could be even related to "old" hardware, which is preventing the complete modern suspend.