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A comment on Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop. Parent comment

Re:Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop by exikyut on Saturday November 20, 2021 @11:27PM (#29294192)
I've read/heard enough Internet anecdata to be >50% confident you're experiencing issues associated with "modern standby", most current implementations of which are horribly broken (both, IIUC, in terms of bad/nonexistent Linux support, and broken Windows experiences).

A quick google found https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-backtracks-on-XPS-15-9570..., which notes that the BIOS removed S3 sleep support (the standby method used since the dinosaurs) in version 1.3.0. The suggestion might be actively harmful, impossible, void your warranty, irrelevant for reason(s) I'm not aware of, or any combination thereof, but I wonder what would happen if you downgraded the BIOS to that version. (Once again, this suggestion is the equivalent of blindly reaching into a Pandora's box full of piranhas, pulling the first thing out I touch, and going "hmm, would this work?" :D)

In any case, googling around for "modern standby" and "s3" (ie, "9570 s3") will reveal the debacle behind the curtain ._.

Edit: Found https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-15-9570-BIOS-1-3-0-sl... which adds some interesting insight ("The issue is the following"), along with https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-15-9570-BIOS-1-3-0-sl... (BIOS downgrade blocked starting at 1.4.0) :(

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Re:Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop by csdvrx on Sunday November 21, 2021 @04:39AM (#29295171)
About a year ago, I wanted to work around BIOS limitations by writing patched ACPI tables, like what was done for a long time for Hackintoshes.

So I documented in more detail my finding for the 9250/7275 on https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/kolf5f/patching_the_d...

I got in touch with a few other people, but nobody seemed very interested, so I gave up and got myself a Thinkpad instead.

If you want to work on that, on a BIOS advertising S3 support, IIRC all you need to do is keep the EC powered so it can proceed the GPE from the power power button. On S01x it's powered off to avoid spurious wakeups.

Get the schematics, disassemble the BIOS, and you'll the logic would be about as complicated as:

if (S01x) { EC_poweroff; }

else { EC_powered; EC_monitor_GPE_something; }

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Re:Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop by artificialLimbs on Sunday November 21, 2021 @12:50AM (#29294476)
I could not get my Latitude 5515 to sleep properly after weeks of playing with it. I settled on a song and dance of setting hibernate on and making sure I pull the power cord out and wait a few seconds before closing the laptop. Works every time and 'bootup' takes a few seconds.
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Re:Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop by mikepurvis on Sunday November 21, 2021 @05:24PM (#29300378)
Interesting! Thanks for the pointer on that. This is a work-issued computer, so I'm not sure I officially even have BIOS/boot access on it, however the Dell Update utility is telling me that I have a 1.21 BIOS update waiting in the wings, so perhaps I'll install that and see what happens. It would be hard to picture it getting any worse, though I suppose the people updating to 1.3 thought that too.
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Re:Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop by exikyut on Sunday November 21, 2021 @08:41PM (#29301776)
Huh.

Before updating...

I was under the impression 1.3.0 was The Update Of Doom, not prior versions. Your BIOS might still have the S3 option available, and furthermore, based on the anecdata I found about downgrade being blocked starting at 1.4.0, you might be able to go to even lower BIOS versions too if you need to.

Even if the option does not appear to be available, it might be an interesting idea to ask around wherever this is being discussed, before updating, in case there's any interesting insight to be had there.

In any case I'd definitely have a thorough look around the current BIOS version first.

If onsite IT has their heads screwed on correctly :) it shouldn't be too difficult to demonstrate the benefits of a) checking the BIOS (if you don't have read-only access) and b) enabling the option if it's available (if you don't have read-write access).

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