Mactel Support

MacBook 5.1 resumes from suspend (wakes) when jostled/dropped.

Bug #375796 reported by Chris Lasher
22
This bug affects 4 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Linux
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Mactel Support
New
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pm-utils
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Bug Description

My MacBook 5.1 (late 2008 aluminum model) resumes from suspend (wakes) when dropped or jostled mildly. This is very undesirable behavior. The computer has woken several times during travel and gotten dangerously hot in its sleeve once. When I set it down today I noticed it turned on before I opened the lid. I then repeated by suspending and gently dropping it again and sure enough, it's waking when being jostled like this.

Steps to repeat:
1) Suspend
2) Shake, thump, or gently drop the MacBook
3) Observe that it resumes, even with lid closed

Revision history for this message
Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33) wrote :

Chris,

For the future, some advice. When you file a bug, you really need to find a package to file it against otherwise no developers will look at it.

I am taking a stab at saying that this is likely due to the sudden motion sensor, and I think it is controlled by the applesmc linux module, or it is a problem with the power management system in Ubuntu.

Revision history for this message
Chris Lasher (chris.lasher) wrote :

Sorry Ricky, I often don't know which packages a lot of these bugs are tied to.

I spoke with a friend with an IBM Thinkpad with accelerometers originally designed to be used for detecting if the notebook is falling (drop-detection). He told me that someone wrote a driver so that apparently it acts as an input device, basically as a joystick. Is this also the case for the MacBook, which also has accelerometers?

Typically the MacBook wakes on interaction with an input device. If the accelerometer is acting as an input device, it would be really nice if it were prevented from being an acceptable input device for system wake.

Revision history for this message
Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33) wrote :

Yes I understand, but it is often not helpful to file a bug unless there is something to file it against.

Yes, there is a driver for the accelerometer in the Macbook Pro. I believe that applesmc enables this hardware on certain machines. I am not sure what hardware it works on, or if it is normally turned off.

You could try unloading the applesmc module and suspending and see if you get the same behavior.

Revision history for this message
Matthew Wardrop (mister.wardrop) wrote :

Unloading/reloading the applesmc module makes no difference. Whilst we can disable that feature, it could be very useful. So it is desirable that this be fixed.

Kind Regards,
Matthew

Revision history for this message
Chris Lasher (chris.lasher) wrote :

As Matthew mentioned, removing applesmc doesn't make a difference.

Has anybody tested this in Karmic, yet? I have a feeling it's not fixed there, either. This is a significant problem to me. Several times I've found my battery completely run down because the laptop awoke from jostling in my backpack and never suspended again. It's also very dangerous because the laptop is running in a confined space.

Revision history for this message
graingert (tagrain) wrote :

I also have this problem on the MacBookPro12,1 with Ubuntu 15.10

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