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My Debian 8, running on HP mini 210-2006, shows a strange behavior:

When I shut it down, and then power it on again in the interval till about 2 hours, the system does not boot, just show a black screen and power on the fans (and maybe the Hard Disk), but does not even show the grub and bios entries, and the keyboard is still unresponsive. In this case, to boot, it is necessary to make a hard reset, and then the machine boots normally. The shutdown process also seems too fast. When the system is put in the suspension mode or hibernation mode, usually (but not always) the same thing happens when it's called back, and then a hard reset is necessary to enter the system. But, if it just rebooted or powered on after something about 2 or 3 hours (or more), it does not happens, the system boots normally. I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu in the same machine, it just happens to Debian 8. Looks like Debian isn't really shutting down before at least two or three hours after the shutdown command is executed. It's strange but Debian keeps in a "hibernation-like" mode for few hours before really shutdown, and in that period it can't be powered on. I've installed the latest bios through Windows 7 (seems HP does not offer an update for Linux).

When the boot succeeds the following ACPI errors always happen:

Feb 12 14:00:07 HP kernel: [ 23.849453] ACPI Error: Field [B128] at 1152 exceeds Buffer [NULL] size 160 (bits) (20140424/dsopcode-236)

Feb 12 14:00:07 HP kernel: [ 23.853104] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [_SB_.WMID.HWCD] (Node f542d2e8), AE_AML_BUFFER_LIMIT (20140424/psparse-536)

Feb 12 14:00:07 HP kernel: [ 23.860310] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [_SB_.WMID.WMAD] (Node f542d2d0), AE_AML_BUFFER_LIMIT (20140424/psparse-536)

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I know this is old, but since almost nobody is reporting this anywhere on the web and somebody else might see this, I thought I'd provide some info:

It's not just your machine or your OS (version); this issue affects all HP Mini 210-2xxx series machines. The ACPI table seems to be seriously out of spec and this seems to be what's causing those issues.

The important part is:

  • When using one of these HP Mini 210-2xxx machines, this happens on all Linux based systems with kernels higher than kernel version 3.13: You will observe the same issues when using RemixOS, which is pure Android, when using CloudReady, which is Chromium OS or with any Linux distro from Gentoo over Arch to Ubuntu and everything in between.

I have verified this on the distros mentioned above on the HP Mini 210-2000 that I have here at home, which is currently running an Ubuntu 14.04 based distro. The 2016 Hardware Enablement Stack update to 14.04.05 upgraded the kernel from 3.13 to 4.4 and suddenly all those issues appeared again: Black screen on next boot after a shutdown, brightness settings not being saved anymore (and therefore booting with a darker screen), console errors that can be seen for a split second when shutting down the system from X.org. None of which happened with the old kernel.

Workaround: Revert back to an older kernel. I know that 3.13 is unaffected, 3.14 probably as well - if you go much higher than that, the symptoms will occur again. Again, since I'm using Ubuntu: Even the 2016 HWE stack which came with kernel 4.4, works without issues if you revert back to kernel 3.13. So reverting only the kernel causes no problems.

Kernel 3.14 has just reached EOL, but there are still updates to the 3.13.11-ckt38 kernel from Canonical, since that kernel is being used in their LTS releases for servers. Those sources can be compiled for use in any Debian system or any other Linux distro for that matter.

I am not sure what changes in the kernel were responsible for causing these issues, but they definitely break things fully for this range of HP Mini machines. It's just funny that this hasn't been documented anywhere on the web - there've been some reports of strange issues but nothing concrete. So I hope the info above helps, since that machine is still a nice netbook for web browsing, even in 2016.

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