Steam Machines will not have suspend/resume
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A Valve engineer has revealed on Github that the suspend/resume function planned for Steam Machines has been cut. The problem, he explained, is one of reliability: "Given the state of hardware and software support throughout the graphics stack on Linux we didn't think we could make this reliable."
The suspend function puts hardware in a state of not-quite-off, which saves power but allows machines to carry on with essential, under-the-hood tasks, and also makes firing them up a much faster process. That second part, the "resume," is where the trouble lies, according to this Slashdot comment, which digs into the issue in considerably greater detail.
"It doesn't probe and reattach the controllers to the same point in the device tree that they were in when the system was suspended. Since those are the device nodes that SteamOS has open at the time of the suspend, and they route to The Noplace(tm), the controllers become unresponsive," user tlambert wrote. "This is a general problem in the Linux device model, and you can see problem in the device model poke their heads up in various places."
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