The news is, grml should probably stop advising kernel upgrades to chase suspend/resume problems. As Linus says, they are 99% driver bugs.
Sure, and those driver bugfixes are part of kernel upgrades.
The point is, there are N drivers and 1 kernel. Linus says these suspend/resume interactions are nasty bugs. When a compile flag multiplies nasty bugs throughout the drivers in the kernel tree, then you have a nightmare of multiplying bugs.
The long-term fix is to correct all the drivers.
The short-term fix is to turn the flag off.
One day all Linux drivers will be operational with experimental suspend/resume. That day is not today. Even kernel devs are saying this recent kernel series is too rushed - the bug triage expert resigned in disgust.
New drivers? We are talking about bugfixes....
I should have said "upgraded bug-fixed" driver.
If CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND causes problems on specific hardware (what's the case) there's a bug somewhere.
Absolutely. There are USB bugs hitting lots of people with 2.6.20: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=406893
The fix for grml/upstream ...not disabling an option but to locate and fix the bug.
Well, I filed a report. If you want to work on it, compile a 2.6.20 without the suspend flag, just to verify that's the issue. Otherwise I'll put that on my list.
2.6.21 is probably not an answer. We can give it a test for you. The hardware worked with previous grmls and we can stay at 0.9 in the worst case.
Thanks again, Mark