Hibernate and Suspend Differences

Under XFCE4, Power Manager settings, there is “Hibernate” and “Suspend” options available for laptop lid close action. When it comes to QubesOS, what are the difference between those two?

I don’t think there is any difference, I don’t think you can hibernate the system.

1 Like

Read this :

3 Likes

Does hibernate work differently with systems that are LUKS encrypted?

I tried the option in dom0 and as far as I can tell suspend in the only option, it doesn’t matter what you select in the power settings.

From what I read, hibernate with LUKS requires a special partition to store that state, you can’t just save it in the LUKS volume.

1 Like

sleep is “suspend to RAM” - system information is stored in RAM and
power is cut to all other devices.
hibernate is “suspend to disk” - the machine state is stored on disk and
the machine is powered off.
hibernation works fine with an encrypted disk.

In Qubes hibernation does not work and there are issues with sleep,
depending on hardware. Even when the machine enters sleep, some devices
may not correctly wake. (On x230 I see a regression where sleep/restore
worked fine, but no longer does so.)

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team. When I comment in the Forum or in the mailing lists I speak for myself.
1 Like

So, what happens if I select “Hibernate” for the lid close action on QubesOS?

I believe it suspends to RAM, unless a setting is changed to power down. The question is what happens if it runs out of RAM? I don’t think it can unless is a swap partition is setup.

1 Like

Good question.

My understanding is that Qubes doesn’t support hibernation because Xen doesn’t support hibernation.

2 Likes

I have migrated from an X220 to X230 machine, and I can confirm that sleep doesn’t work with qubes os 4.1. When I close the lid, or hit the sleep button, the computer apparently goes to sleep, the thinkpad’s sleep LED shines on the laptop lid. However, when I open the lid up or hit the sleep button again to wake it up, the computer reboots afresh. That sucks, as the sleep functionality was working on my X220 machine…

Gotta add both X220 and X230 machines have 16 GB of RAM.

My librem13v3 nominally sleeps.

The problem is when it wakes up again it runs so doggone slowly I wish I had shut it down. What’s worse is it can take 5 minutes or so to shut down when I realize my mistake and decide to restart the system.

1 Like