Linux Dump: Laptop is laggy after suspend

This guide started to become very long as I try to solve this problem. Here is basically a log on everything I tried.

Symptoms

After resuming from suspend, the CPU clock is stuck near the absolute minimum, in my case ~500 MHz affecting general performance.

The issue seems to appear when the laptops is suspended on low battery.

Ultimate solution

Still haven’t found anything very specific. Best results come from

• Going back to acpi-cpufreq scaling driver.
• Daily-driving the linux-lts kernel.
• Using tlp for managing battery. See TLP for information on how to install and configure it.
• Suspending on power and decent battery levels when possible.

The Journey

Software-level solutions

There are several software-level solutions you can try, such ac

1. Changing power profile.
2. Forcing frequency scaling to performance mode.
3. Change suspend mode. In my case, my laptop only allows s2idle. You can see more information on the Suspend and Hibernate Arch Wiki page.

Nothing from this worked for me. But it could work for you.

Firmware-level solutions

If software does not work, then this might be a firmware/BIOS problem.

1. Check for BIOS updates.
2. Disable power-saving features on the BIOS options.

Nothing from this worked for me. But it could work for you.

Driver-level solutions

The issue might be driver-related. In particular my laptops uses the amd-pstate-epp driver, which has some related-reported issues on bugzilla and on reddit as well.

To figure out your driver, run

cpupower frequency-info

A workaround for this is to change the driver on the boot options from GRUB. There are several options, and make a new GRUB config file with the command

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg && reboot

• To use the regular amd-pstate scaling driver

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="... amd_pstate=disable"

Did not work for me after some days of testing. But I still encourage whoever is reading this to try this approach.

• To use the older acpi-cpufreq driver

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="... initcall_blacklist=amd_pstate_init amd_pstate.enable=0"

Best results so far, but still the problem arises from time to time. It seems to be that the problem only arises when on battery power. Nothing on software seems to fix this, so I believe it is a BIOS/firmware issue.

Ignore Processor Power Cap

This seems to fix the problem for some people. Ignoring the Processor Power Cap (PPC).

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="... processor.ignore_ppc=1"

Did not work for me. But I still encourage whoever is reading this to try this approach.

Changing to LTS kernel

The LTS kernel might have better and more stable behavior. Did not work for me, but you can still try. Install the kernel by

sudo pacman -S linux-lts linux-lts-headers

Add the following to your GRUB configuration so that it becomes easier to return to the last used kernel.

GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true

remake the GRUB configuration and reboot.

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg && reboot

You will find the kernels under “Advances Options for Arch Linux”, but when both kernels are installed, GRUB defaults to the LTS.