Software Suspend - Userspace User Interface

The user interface for Suspend2, Suspend2-UserUI, is now a separate program that runs in userspace - it no longer exists in the kernel. This allows for greater flexibility in the user interface, and less potential for fatal issues to arise in kernel-space. Suspend2-UserUI is an optional component of Suspend2, however, it can make your suspending experience much more enjoyable.

Having Suspend2-UserUI allows you to interact with the suspend process as it happens. This mean you can press Escape to cancel a suspend, press R to toggle rebooting at the end of suspending, change the verbosity level to see what's going on, etc.

There currently exists two user interfaces for Suspend2:

• suspend2ui_text - this provides a text-based progress bar, mimicking the original familiar user interface of Suspend2.
• suspend2ui_fbsplash - based on fbsplash (note the fbsplash kernel patch is NOT required), this provides a graphical themeable progress bar. Painting a progress bar whilst suspending to disk actually requires a fair bit of CPU grunt, and isn't recommended for machines slower than about 700-900MHz. Otherwise, the speed of suspending is notably reduced.

Obtaining it

Both UIs are available in the same UserUI package from the Downloads page. This is a source package - distributed binaries may be available for your distribution.

Building it

Download the userui sources (get the latest one from the download page),

~ $ wget http://tuxonice.net/downloads/all/suspend2-userui-0.5.1.tar.gz

extract them,

~ $ tar xzf suspend2-userui-0.5.1.tar.gz

compile them,

~ $ cd suspend2-userui-0.5.1
~/suspend2-userui-0.5.1 $ make

Note that userui_fbsplash will only compile if you have all the relevant libraries and dev files (libpng, libz, libjpeg). To compile only the text one, just use make suspend2ui_text.

and install them

~/suspend2-userui-0.5.1 $ su
Password: ******
~/suspend2-userui-0.5.1 # make install

Using it

In your hibernate script, put the path to the suspend2ui_text or suspend2ui_fbsplash binary into /proc/suspend2/userui_program. For example, in the hibernate script use a line like

ProcSetting userui_program /usr/local/sbin/userui_text

If you have your own custom script, use

echo /usr/local/sbin/userui_text > /proc/suspend2/userui_program

The UI program is started automatically by the kernel, and lives for the duration of the suspend and resume process. It is saved into the image, however upon resume it will not automatically be available for the first part of resuming: Resuming is split into two portions - the first portion will read in the core kernel image and the userui, the second portion reads other userspace application data and file caches, etc. This means that after the first portion of the image is read on resume, the original UI process from suspend time will continue running.

If you wish to have a UI prior to that point (for the first portion of resume), you will need to incorporate your UI program inside an initrd or initramfs, (along with your theme if you are using the fbsplash UI). By default, the kernel will look in the same location for the UI as when suspending (as determined by the userui_program proc entry at suspend time). However, you may have it in a different location in your initrd, and simply echo the appropriate path into /proc/suspend2/userui_program prior to resuming.

As initrd/initramfs creation is very diverse and distribution specific, the specifics will not be covered here.

suspend2ui_fbsplash specifics

The fbsplash UI will use the suspend2 theme found in /etc/splash/suspend2/. The easiest way to manage your themes is to simply create a symlink /etc/splash/suspend2 that points to the directory containing your preferred theme.