Ubuntu 16.04 Black Screen when waking from suspend

Question

My computer displays a black screen on waking from suspend/hibernate.

This problem was present on 14.04, but was solved when I changed to a proprietary driver (NVIDIA). I recently wiped my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and faced the same old problem, however, this time it was not solved by changing the driver.

I tried the fixes given in the following pages but to no avail:

1. Blank screen after suspend/hibernate on 14.04
2. Laptop Screen Black After Suspend
3. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2220085
4. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1283938

I am using an HP Pavilion 15 Notebook, with NVIDIA GEFORCE Graphics card.

Answer 1

If you don't have enough space on your swap partition, you might get a black screen when you awaken your system from hibernation. The black screen used to happen to me, until I decided to sacrifice the necessary hard drive space for Suspend-to-Disk (hibernation).

Your swap partition needs to be at least as big as your RAM size.

This is covered in the The Official Ubuntu Swap FAQ:

Hibernation (suspend-to-disk) The hibernation feature (suspend-to-disk) writes out the contents of RAM to the swap partition before turning off the machine. Therefore, your swap partition should be at least as big as your RAM size. The hibernation implementation currently used in Ubuntu, swsusp, needs a swap or suspend partition. It cannot use a swap file on an active file system.

Here's a table of example swap partitions, relative to RAM size, taken from The Official Ubuntu Swap FAQ. They recommend a swap partition a little bigger then your RAM.

(last 3 columns denote swap space)

        RAM(MB) No hibernation  With Hibernation  Maximum
         256     256              512               512
         512     512             1024              1024
        1024    1024             2048              2048

        RAM(GB) No hibernation  With Hibernation  Maximum
          1      1                2                   2
          2      1                3                   4
          3      2                5                   6
          4      2                6                   8
          5      2                7                  10
          6      2                8                  12
          8      3               11                  16
         12      3               15                  24
         16      4               20                  32
         24      5               29                  48
         32      6               38                  64
         64      8               72                 128
        128     11              139                 256

If you don't have enough swap space, then Suspend-to-Disk will not work.

Click this link to learn how to increase your swap space.