Hibernation failure due to NVidia driver: How I fixed it

[NicolasDorier]

If you use NVIDIA and resuming from hibernation behaves like a normal reboot, this may be the cause.

On my machine, the system was hibernating, but NVIDIA was preventing the hibernation image from being restored.

Symptoms

After running:

systemctl hibernate

the machine powers off, but when powered back on it boots normally and all previous windows/session state are lost.

First thing to try

NVIDIA has systemd services for suspend/hibernate/resume support:

sudo systemctl enable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-resume.service
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-hibernate.service

Reboot and try hibernation again.

If that works, stop here.

If it still behaves like a reboot, continue.

Check the logs

Check the previous boot:

journalctl -b -1

or the current boot after a failed resume:

journalctl -b

In my case, I saw this:

kernel: printk: Suspending console(s) (use no_console_suspend to debug)
kernel: NVRM: GPU 0000:01:00.0: PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations module parameter is set. System Power Management attempted without driver procfs suspend interface. Please refer to the 'Configuring Power Management Support' section in the driver README.
kernel: nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: pci_pm_freeze(): nv_pmops_freeze [nvidia] returns -5
kernel: nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: dpm_run_callback(): pci_pm_freeze returns -5
kernel: nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: failed to quiesce async: error -5
kernel: PM: hibernation: resume failed (-5)

The important part is:

PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations module parameter is set.
System Power Management attempted without driver procfs suspend interface.

What this means

NVIDIA has two power-management paths:

1. The older procfs-based path and PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations:1, using:

/proc/driver/nvidia/suspend

2. The newer kernel suspend notifier path, using:

NVreg_UseKernelSuspendNotifiers=1

The older path relies on the NVIDIA systemd services writing to:

/proc/driver/nvidia/suspend

Check whether that file exists:

ls /proc/driver/nvidia

If suspend exists, your issue may be different.

If suspend does not exist, but NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 is enabled, NVIDIA may abort hibernation with pci_pm_freeze returns -5.

If /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend does not exist, the old services are not useful for this path, you can disable them if you enabled them before:

sudo systemctl disable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-resume.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-hibernate.service

We will switch to the new way with NVreg_UseKernelSuspendNotifiers=1.

This is documented in the Arch Wiki: preserving video memory after suspend.

Why the older power-management path was used?

When I ran:

cat /proc/driver/nvidia/params | grep -E 'PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations|UseKernelSuspendNotifiers'

It would show

PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations: 1
UseKernelSuspendNotifiers: 1

This indicate that both, the old and new ways are enabled. In this situation, the drivers seems to fallback on the old way, but because the suspend interface isn't exposed by the driver, hibernation doesn't work.

In my case, PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations: 1 was coming from GPU Screen Recorder, not from my own NVIDIA config.

It installs this file: (From gpu-screen-recorder)

/usr/lib/modprobe.d/gsr-nvidia.conf

which contains:

options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1

That forced the old behavior and caused hibernation resume to fail.

Do not edit files under /usr/lib/modprobe.d directly. They are package-owned and can be overwritten by updates.

Instead, mask the package file by creating an empty file with the same name under /etc/modprobe.d:

sudo install -m 0644 /dev/null /etc/modprobe.d/gsr-nvidia.conf

Then rebuild the initramfs / Limine entries:

sudo limine-mkinitcpio

Reboot.

Verify after reboot

Check NVIDIA parameters:

cat /proc/driver/nvidia/params | grep -E 'PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations|UseKernelSuspendNotifiers'

The expected result is:

PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations: 0
UseKernelSuspendNotifiers: 1

If that is the case, hibernation should now work properly.
If you see PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations: 2 instead, you need #5519 and reboot.

Then try hibernation again:

systemctl hibernate

[NicolasDorier]

I submitted a PR on omacom/omarchy-pkgs#84 disabling gsr-nvidia.conf. Hopefully that will solve it out of the box.

[NicolasDorier]

Note, I've notice that PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations became now value 2 on my system after I've run limine-update again for some reason...

I am digging around about what is changing it now.

---

It turns out that a previous reboot, I've set PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations:0 explicitely in gsr-nvidia rather than remove the file.
You might see PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations:2 instead if you removed it like I documented. Probably need to add a modprobe to force it to 0.

[NicolasDorier]

Found the issue...
We need to add the option to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf

  # Disable NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations so NVreg_UseKernelSuspendNotifiers is used for hibernation
  sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf <<EOF >/dev/null
options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=0
EOF
sudo limine-update

[NicolasDorier]

Need that #5519 merged too.

[NicolasDorier]

Discussion going on #5554 since #5519 got reverted.