Hardware and partition questions for Linux Mint refugee

Ask Fedora
1

I was shoulder deep in an involved dual-boot system setup in Mint on an EliteBook 840 G10. After much effort, learned way too late that both s2idle and S3 deep (whatever exactly that was truly doing, given my 13th gen Intel chip) both had impassable wake/suspend exit behavior. Plugged 40+ hours into finding out it was all garbage – s2idle would suddenly play dead (not even charger LED) and S3 [which I obviously would have loved to have] took 5–6 minutes to resume with a dead keyboard. Tried everything I could find, kernel rollbacks, nothing doing

It left me wondering if I bought a lemon; but I heard Fedora has best hardware support without sacrificing much system stability. So I’m here (on a live boot) wondering if experienced users might tell me of any red flags per the setup I was almost done setting up:

Separate / and /home partitions, plus a separate ‘backup’ partition to mimic my external drive backup
…then a shared partition made from my Windows 11 “C:” part. Main reason I bring this up is because I figure BTRFS for Fedora will impact whether that’s possible, as I was about to do (with NTFS) just before learning system sleep (let alone keyboard controller) was suddenly a huge issue in these 21st century technological backwaters. (Can I still make a ‘share’ part with NTFS for both OSes? …mainly to share A. multimedia bouncedowns from Windows DAWs and/or B. regular old files I might want to use in a preferred FOSS daily driver and whatever vanilla Windows businessy crap I might get into later.)

Does all this sound reasonably easy (or even moderately difficult but readily doable) for someone who’s gotten this far?

***Most important: do I have anyone’s attention who bear similar scars from EliteBook and/or i8042 keyboard controller problems? Honestly still reeling @ how crippling such hardcore simpleton issues somehow became. I believe the keystone hardware/firmware hurdle Mint (using kernels 6.17, 7.0, and most disappointingly the latest 6.6) couldn’t overcome was embedded controller timeouts that caused endless ACPI error loops.

I don’t really know nor even like computers very much; just learned/ing what I needed to to make the damn thing (not really even) work

k thank ya very much – and tip of the trendy hipster hat d;)

Edit: I have same exact 5–6-minute wake and lost-keyboard behavior here, with echo deep | sudo tee /sys/power/mem_sleep – but s2idle seems reliable so far.

2

AFAIK Fedora doesn’t doesn’t do anything special with regards to hardware support on x86_64 platform though it does try for ARM platforms such as Qualcomm X Elite devices.

What Fedora does is simply provide more recent firmware by having a rolling release kernel within a given release, and launching a new major version every 6 months with more recent kernel, along with the Fedora Respins SIG regenerating desktop ISOs with more updated software after release.

One of the reason BTRFS is great to use is that you don’t need multiple separate partitions for each mount point. Instead of multiple linux data partitions, the Fedora installer by default simply makes one btrfs partition with two internal subvolumes which are mounted as /(root) and /home. If you were to mount this btrfs partition, the top level would just have two folders called root and home.

I don’t see any obvious problems that this default BTRFS partition scheme would cause issues with your backups.

Yes, you could even reuse an existing NTFS partition after installation.
You could also configure the mount point during installation by using the Storage Editor to setup your desired partition scheme. Personally unless it later mentions the EFI System partition is smaller than recommended, I would use the automatic installation using the “Share this drive with other operating systems” and then setup extra partitoin mounts after installation.

3

Thank you, Kenric. I didn’t know exactly what Fedora does re: hardware support except that there was language like “legendary” reputation for overcoming hardware issues other distros couldn’t. That it hits the best balance between stability and staying as reasonably up to date as possible. I didn’t even mean to get a newer laptop; was just being a specs junkie and this one popped up.

I’m on the “separate root and /home partitions” track because I liked the option to restore system snapshots without touching personal files. That saved me at one point when I wanted a clean slate after grub /etc/ file modifications didn’t pan out. Is this somehow less or not at all a thing on Fedora?

And you made me think about the bootloader partition … I suppose it handles all that. I neglected the biggest concern I had, actually: what complications might I have installing Fedora on my multi-partition drive (the EFI at far left [I think ~200Mb], then “C:” – Mint’s separate Root, /Home, and ‘backup’ parts, and some small NTFS part Windows jams at the end [something about system recovery, I think] ) ? …will the installer handle all/most of that – or do you think I have some partition housekeeping to do first? Thanks again :+1:

PS: S’pose I should also consider swap at this point… since the power/suspend issues took me down last time, I may be looking at hibernate (so I can power it down but not off and transport it in a pack) and might want to keep the option open (I didn’t, last time)

4

Wouldn’t it make more sense in the immediate term to do an installation on a USB drive and test the sleep functionality on that before making changes to a functional, if not entirely ideal, system?

5

I was just casually testing it on live boot. Is that not representative of installed-on-a-drive behavior, though?
My effort on Mint convinced me even s2idle was unstable (and almost declare the laptop unusable); if I can just confirm it works on Fedora, anything else would be a bonus. The problem on Mint (22.3) was an about 1/20–50 chance it wouldn’t wake up from a normal lid-close suspend.

Edit: I’m seeing that live boot is a poor substitute for power/suspend functions… that USB drive tip is sage !
Not sure if I have another large external drive though. Could live boot be at least sufficient for ruling out failure-to-wake issues?

Edit 2: Seems to me like this would mean live may actually be good enough: “Because Fedora updates its kernel constantly, its Live USB already carries the newest hardware code directly from those OEMs.” Is that true?

6

If you want to make test with newer kernels and Live ISO’s, you need to download the
https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/live-respins/ Respins.

If you use the default from the download page, this comes with the kernel which has been released when F44 has been announced.

About the hardware, also with Fedora you can have a hard live if you have bought the wrong hardware. As fedora just comes with opensource software you need in some cases search for specific drivers for exotic setups.

A good help might be https://linux-hardware.org/ too see if your system runs on other distributions.

7

What do you mean by “…can have a hard live..” ?

Looks like this main release (Fedora Workstation 44, from April 28) uses kernel 6.19… while the respin (according to Google AI) uses 7.0. I’m glad you told me about this. So I would totally replace the frozen release / remake my boot drive with the respin .iso, right?

8

Yes if you like to test the newest kernel with a live ISO. Just shows that Fedora is not standing still. We do move ahead :wink:

This is with Linux in general. If you like to have peace with your computer, without reinstalling drivers after an update of the kernel, just use hardware which is supported with the kernel by default. Unfortunately for more complex setups this is not always possible.

9

I wouldn’t bet on a live USB showing up sleep/wake issues but then I’ve also never asked a live session to sleep. As for a “large external drive” you should be able to install Fedora on 8-16GB, you can install Linux on an SD card if it comes to it, it will just be slow. But at least with regard to what you need to test, a proper install should be as good as any other proper install regardless of what you install it on.

This is as true as OEMs make it with their contributions to the Linux kernel, unless distros are out there specifically stripping out OEM patches, if you’re running the same kernel version you should see the same basic behaviour on every distro.

10

Fedora has a policy of shipping each new linux kernel release after it was been tested.
That means you get a new kernel that matches upsteam every 6ish weeks.
This a weekly kernel update with upsteam releases patches.

Fedora is currently on the 7.0 kernels and at patch 12 aka 7.0.12.
I’m expecting 7.1 kernels to show up soon for Fedora 44 and the 7.2 kernel is in testing already.

What this means is that you get the hardware support and security fixes quickly,
but the down side is there are sometimes regressions. If that happens then you just boot off the pervious kernel. By default Fedora keeps 3 kernels installed and boots the newest.

I assume @ilikelinux means that if your hardware is not supported by the upsteam linux kernel you can have an “interesting” time getting support. Especially turn for new laptops that the vendors love to add new chipsets to.

11

One exception is recent systems that are sold with Linux. These often have newer components and need drivers that are not yet available from linux.org.

It is important to note that newer kernels often require vendor firmware updates. Vendors are often slow to release firmware updates for models not sold with Linux as an option.

12

So choose hardware from vendors who officially support / are friendly with Linux distros? I learned that the hard way with this one :sweat_smile: :sob: I will never again hear “laptop” or “computer” and “sleep mode” without a hard spike of cortisol. Didn’t even know about all that till now – it’s just absolute pre-school level sorting basics out. Never again, HP; never.

13

A usb flash drive of 16 GB size or larger would work for an installation onto a usb device for testing purposes.

14

Last night, I did some pretty complex-seeming things to it (and my Mint system, as a comparison). A ‘system freeze test’ I cautiously/painstakingly had a LLM guide me through – manually creating a low-power state (max CState) and preventing PCIe bus links from wating it up, then inducing a 60-second ‘rtcwake’ ‘freeze’ loop. It was a quick and dirty method in distinction to an elaborate, real-world test where I might induce a longer freeze (~60 minutes) after bogging down ram, and triggerring disk write and network activity.

Knowing mostly only that I don’t know, the goal is to stress test Mint to cause the “failure to wake” from s2idle fake sleep problems that sent me down this path… then run the same test on Fedora, watch it pass [not lock up], and consider it a green flag to install it and pretend to be happy about it all.

[Sorry; this is the brief version]

FWIW, F. Workstation 44 live boot survived the sleep/wake stress test – but then again, so did Mint. Sooo it’s another day … but hopefully some good ppl here can tell me what I don’t know but should.

~*~

To simply proceed, I’m hoping to see some proof that this somewhat new machine is best off under Fedora’s shinier, tech-advanced hat than continuing to wonder if I don’t like the taste of mint after all.

For that matter, I also saw some Fedora log errors pointing to failure to send RAM thermal sensor tests to the motherboard (or something)… which reflects some clues I had during my Mint EC timeout/ACPI error storms that failed thermal read functions (along with i8042 keyboard issuse) correlated with the whole zombie-mode sleep issues.

Saying all this in case a wiser individual can stop me and point me toward a simpler solution to determine if Fedora will iron out much more of these power management issues. I’d just updated BIOS too, btw (no perceptible effect on Mint’s s2idle issues)… and the new BIOS version was literally a month old.

It’s a big mess – but I have confidence that I’ll find a clear sign Fedora is the way to go for ghost-in-the-machine busting (having failed to take LikeLinux’s important hardware-support advice :nut_and_bolt: :robot: :collision: :cry:)

Yes, I’m not too afraid of possible need to try different kernels. With little/no experience, I tried three different in Mint and it was quite pain free. That said, I’m also trying to secure working knowledge in how Fedora handles snapshots; meaning some reading about BTRFS basics too.
[And Lol; “interesting” time indeed :face_with_peeking_eye: :face_with_bags_under_eyes:]

George, et al:
About the newer/older kernel and respins… for my purposes, maybe it would even be helpful (certainly easier) to stress test sleep/power issues with a slightly out-of-date kernel? Not equating newer with better, of course; but I assume Fedora devs generally deserve more faith than Ubuntu’s in expecting greater hardware harmony over time. And I’ve been curious, how long do backport decisions usually take? … are they reflected in the “patch” portion of a kernel’s numbering?

Sorry if I’m all over the place – scrambling like mad to reign it all in. Things getting super messy as I try to clean them…

16

Power management needs vendor firmware and linux kernel support, while linux distros focus on choice of installers, desktop environments, third party packages, and security mechanisms such as SELinux. Distros differ in update schedules, so you can encounter transient differences in available versions of kernels and packages. Many large 3rd party packages have long lists of optional features or license restrictions that result in differences in packages. Groups of users who rely on particular 3rd party packages often form clusters around a distro that meets their needs and can exert pressure to support their needs going forward, or create ways to adapt other distros to their needs.

Linux users can reduce risks associated with very new hardware by having alternatives for problematic capabilities. Networking, sound, specialized input devices are often problematic.

17

Heya, if I create two probes on linux-hardware.org – one for Mint and one for Fedora (it created one for this live session no problem), would it be good enough to determine which has innately better hardware support/function? E.g., “This OS shows more ‘failed’ entries, so it works poorly for this laptop’s hardware,” – or even “This OS has more ‘works’ entries beyond merely ‘detected’” ?

Since S3 is a lost cause, I’m hoping the Fedora cluster is also the way to at least optimizing s2idle’s power efficiency!
By “alternatives”, do you mean whole new distros, or something more granular (like changing kernels, flashing old BIOS versions, and things I wouldn’t even know about)?

18

I’m afraid this where I have to step back because we’re going beyond my knowledge. Here’s hoping that a fix does exist for the issue.

19

I appreciate the external drive tip – and to be sure, I am hardly knowledgeable about these things I only just heard of yesterday :sweat_smile:

–

Looking at BTRFS pros and cons now… wondering if the speed sacrifice is actually a dealbreaker alone (and I don’t trust myself to use Fedora on ext4), as I’m hoping to use this fancy thing to record/overdub audio with minimal latency. I wonder if BTRFS, for now, is somewhat off the table for involved audio production purposes? Higher chance of file fragmentation is also red flaggy… Too much to know all at once. Personal computing has become way too overwhelming.

[Edit: Looks like my “don’t use ext4 with Fedora” concern is less problematic than it seemed on a cursory look; that it’s hardly a big deal at all to just stick with ext4 if you’re already used to it, and it won’t “break” anything nor make daily Fedora use harder.]

20

For me it has been mostly building large packages with non-default options that were important for my use case. In some cases this was to support Fortran and in others there were license complications like not using a library for military purposes that didn’t apply to my project but prevent use by a distro package.

21

I was scrounging around, searching for which distro handles this finnicky device the best — and I saw the one Fedora entry on linux-hardware.org not only showed solid marks, but was wayyy back in 2023: HP EliteBook 840 14 inc...

The other distros with many “works” and few “failed” entries were Ubuntu; and if Canonical weren’t putting ads in terminal and the like, I’d have put them at top of the “hardware-supportive” list.

…Just leavin this here for any other scroungers distro-shoppin’ a recent EliteBook to life… (planting trees; shade of which I will not see :wink: