Tried to hibernate; wpa_supplicant refused to freeze; process unkillable; cannot halt

^ mouthful of a topic.

Debian Lenny with a smattering of packages from Sid, 2.6.22-2-686 kernel, on a Thinkpad R61.

The story is, hibernation works on my laptop, except when it doesn't:

Sep  7 12:45:56 thrawn kernel: Stopping user space processes timed out after 20 seconds (1 tasks refusing to freeze):
Sep  7 12:45:56 thrawn kernel:  wpa_supplicant

That's the first time. The next time I try to hibernate, ip and NetworkManager also refuse to freeze. So I try to kill the processes, but now every sudo command is freezing doing nothing and not responding to ^C, ^D, or ^Z. And if I try to hibernate again, now sudo won't freeze. So I kill X (Ctrl+Alt+Bksp woohoo) and log in on a TTY. Same story, so I go to the next TTY (can't interrupt the command I tried, as before) and log in as root. kill -9 XYZ runs and exits silently but does not kill the offending processes. poweroff (still as root) starts to work but then freezes on a stopping a network-related program (Shorewall in this case). Fortunatly, the magic SysRq key combo works, so I Alt+SysRq+(R, E, I, S, U, B) my way to an emergency reboot.

But this is obviously not ideal, and I also have no idea how a process can not be killed by root kill -9ing it.

Ideas? Help? Need more details?

Hey @AlucardZero

12 years later, I have a fresh install of mint Tessa with kernel 4.18 on my gf's laptop and I'm having the EXACT same problem. Unable to suspend or hibernate. I get a black screen after tying to suspend and after about 20 seconds, I see a line saying that "Freezing of tasks failed after 20 seconds(2 tasks refusing to freeze, wq_busy=0) and then nothing works properly.
Sudo commands do nothing and ^C does nothing as well. I can restart x with ctr+alt+back, but that opens up a can of works, as I'm only left with powering off the laptop, as nothing else won't work. no browser, no terminal, nothing. I can only move the mouse, open pop-up menus, like the Applications menu, but that's it.

I've spent some time trying to debug this and this is what I have done and found.

1. I've checked the syslog and noticed that cups-browsed and wpa_supplicant were the culprits, in most cases.
2. I've disabled cups as I don't have a printer.
3. Retested with suspend and rechecked the syslog and found that wpa_supplicant is now the only culprit.
4. found that if you restart wpa_supplicant service, you can then suspend as usual, but not always. It's a bit touch and go.

I was wondering if you managed to resolve your issue, as I'm still trying to get this solved.

Hopefully you're still a user and hopefully you remember what you did 12 years ago. More so, hopefully you're still alive, dude.

Waiting patiently for an answer.

Andrei.

P.S.: New here so if you need more info, let me know.

Hey zombalau87 - Welcome to LQ.

In case the OP is no longer active here, I'll give you my 2 cents on this ...

Hibernating and or suspend/resume on linux has usually been a challenge for me. I've got it working on all my current devices - suspend/resume just works without any added effort with kernel 4.20, but hibernating requires some preparation.

I suggest reading the Arch Linux wiki entry on this (link below). Even though you're using Mint, you may find some useful info. Amongst other things (i.e. scripts that stop and start services, unload and reload modules like wireless drivers ...), it can be necessary to provide certain hooks in mkinitcpio.conf (or equivalent for Mint) and specify the proper switches/options on the kernel line at boot and configure swap space accordingly.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._and_hibernate

Cheers - don't hesitate if you want more assistance.

Hey Rickkk,

Hehe.
1st off, i'm writing this from my phone so please excuse any grammatical errrors.

Thanks for replying. Here's what I did.

1. Disabled all suspend options in UI(polkit, logind.conf, etc.)
2. Disabled systemd suspend & hibernate functions. This can be done in various ways. Reading this, you are a google search away. If you need the details here, reply to the post.
3. Installed pm-utils
4. Added script in /etc/pm/sleep.d to kill wpa-supplicant process #!/bin/sh (killall -9 wpa_supplicant; exit 0)
5. Created script to run sudo pm-suspend and made a panel from it. Open in terminal
6. Added user rights using sudo visudo to execute the script without a password
7. Click on icon=suspend @ 100% success rate.

If you need full instructions, please reply. I am an email watcher.

Cheers
Andrei