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Comment by net01 | Hacker News Reader

Seeing modern standby is pretty insane in such a short time; it was one of the most attended talks in the BSD talks at FOSDEM:

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6390-wake...

Also pretty impressive because Aymeric started as a GSoC contributor and is now sponsored to work on BSD by the foundation.

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"Short time"? Look, I appreciate that you mean the development time for the feature to be added, but S0+network was introduced over a decade ago. Early versions were in Windows 8. It shipped in Windows 8.1 in 2013. Your link is from 2025 where they're talking about S3 support no longer existing at the hardware level.

I'm really happy BSD is getting support, but they literally waited until hardware for the deprecated standard to cease to exist before implementing the new support.

That's not a short amount of time.

If this is what Microsoft called "connected standby" it's worth noting that the early implementation of this even on Surface hardware with Windows 8 was hot garbage. It liked to wake itself up in your bag and completely drain the battery while cooking the computer from lack of ventilation. I made a point of always turning the Surface the whole way off any time I packed it up because it was so unreliable. Best case the battery drained like 5% per hour.

Hopefully the initial BSD implementation is better than Windows did.

Oh, no doubt it was hot garbage in 8. It was slightly improved in 8.1, and there were real improvements in the system in Win10 that really made it work better. Win10 was the first good version.

But Win10 is still over 10 years old. Win10 is end of life in about 2 months.

Good? Come on. Even few years ago I remember reading people here and on Reddit complaining how their laptops cooked themselves to death in backpacks and OEMs shrugging "you should've turned it off".

"Modern" standby was and is still a hot garbage, and it'll always be, because it's defective by design.

What’s defective in its design

It's a sleep mode but nothing is really asleep and your system could wake up at any time to do whatever it wants. what could go wrong? (I mean apart from draining the battery or cooking the mainboard

Seems to work fine on macs so I don’t think the premise is defective by design. I thought maybe you had some particular examples of poor technical choices to offer

My experience would’ve been 8.1 already, just double checked and that’s what the Surface Pro 3 shipped with. And I don’t think they had connected standby on the prior Surfaces (at least officially).

Even on Windows, the S0 era of sleep has been horrible. Regular stories about laptops coming to life in the night: fully draining the battery and/or cooking themselves in a bag.

My least favorite thing about the current generation of laptops. Even fully powered off, they sometimes wake up and run their batteries down to 0. I do not understand why this behavior is allowed for a computer that’s not plugged in to mains.

Some loser's sense of self-worth is tied to the number of windows machines updating on their mandated schedule no matter what

That's a tad dramatic, Daphne.

s/loser/sociopathic asshole/

I took it to mean, a relatively short period of time after funding became available. Bear in mind, it's a report from the Foundation.

It's insufficiently documented, two of the most powerful corporations on earth are unwilling to assist if not actively hostile to the efforts, and it touches every single subsystem in the kernel. Ten years is fantastic.

OpenBSD's had suspend-to-idle (S0i) aka "modern standby" since 7.6 (2024), at least on Intel. 7.8 will have better AMD support.

Does it actually work in a meaningful way on any hardware? In my testing, it still discharges the battery at about the same rate as leaving the OS up and turning the screen off, where Linux is about on par with Windows. But I might have a laptop the devs don't have access to, so I'm just left unsure where (if anywhere) it works as intended.

Yes, AFAIK it depends on the machine, on Intel at least there's debug output printed in the dmesg that should show if/how long it stays in different power states.

I think there is still work ongoing to improve battery life.

Is the testing documented anywhere? It's hard to sift through tech@ to find this stuff.

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