I have a Thinkpad T470p laptop with Linux Mint 20.1 (Xfce) installed for personal use and power management is one of the things I dislike in otherwise a pretty good laptop. Compared to my work laptop, a Macbook, the Thinkpad drains battery in sleep mode and I often find the battery completely drained if I happen to not to use the laptop for a couple of days.
Since Linux Mint does not come with Hibernation option enabled out of the box, following are the steps I did to enable this option.
Swap partition
I found it is easier to have the right size of swap partition at installation time rather than trying hibernation support based on a swap file. Following instructions are based on my setup with a swap partition.
I created a swap partition of 25G since I have 24G of RAM at install time.
Install hibernate utilities
Install hibernate utils,
sudo apt install pm-utils && sudo pm-hibernate
Update grub
Find the UUID of the swap partition by grep swap /etc/fstab.
You need to update grub boot loader to add option to resume from disk. For that,
edit /etc/default/grub and modify the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT as super
user1.
In my case the the required edit looks as follows.
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash resume=UUID=putYourSwapUUIDhere"
Then update grub with command sudo update-grub.
Power menu
Now you should be able to hibernate with systemctl hibernate.
However the power menu in Linux Mint doesn’t show the Hibernate option.
For that I needed to add the following policy2 to
/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/90-mandatory.d/enable-hibernate.pkla.
[Enable hibernate]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate;org.freedesktop.login1.handle-hibernate-key;org.freedesktop.login1;org.freedesktop.login1.hibernate-multiple-sessions
ResultActive=yes
After adding the policy Hibernate should show up as a power management option in the Mint menu.
Hibernation has been working quite smoothly thus far in my laptop. I prefer to use this option when I know that I’m not likely to pick up the laptop in a while.