My laptop is configured to suspend when idle. After going to lunch and coming back, the power light was flashing. Keyboard and mouse presses did nothing. I pressed the power key once, and it started a clean boot, suggesting it had either shutdown or crashed instead of suspending cleanly. The last line in /var/log/messages from before the restart is Oct 23 14:08:34 laptop kernel: vbetool[27346]: segfault at 244d ip 0806fa87 sp bffa6040 error 4 in vbetool[8047000+45000]
/var/log/pm-suspend.log looks interesting. Other files like /var/log/dmesg.old look too old to contain anything directly relevant. Initial commandline parameters: --quirk-vbestate-restore --quirk-vbe-post Thu Oct 23 14:08:31 EST 2008: Running hooks for suspend. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00clear suspend: success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/01grub suspend: not applicable. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/05led suspend: not applicable. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/10NetworkManager suspend: success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/49bluetooth suspend: not applicable. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/50modules suspend: not applicable. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/55battery suspend: success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/65alsa suspend: success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/90clock suspend: success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/94cpufreq suspend: success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95led suspend: not applicable. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95packagekit suspend: success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99hd-apm-restore.hook suspend: saving level 128 for device sda success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video suspend: Allocated buffer at 0x20000 (base is 0x0) ES: 0x2000 EBX: 0x0000 /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video: line 46: 27346 Segmentation fault vbetool "$@" success. Thu Oct 23 14:08:34 EST 2008: performing suspend
It happened a second time. In this case, I pressing a key on the inbuilt keyboard caused a couple of other lights to light up and the power light to go solid, suggesting it was trying to wake up, but the screen stayed blank. That sounds a whole lot like bug 414971. (I thought I was using the nvidia driver, but it turns out it recently got changed to nv.)
Going to assume it's a dupe. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 414971 ***