Please make suspend-to-state-S3 work

I have an older and relatively power hungry HTPC, and it would be Nice if I could make this thing wake up from the comfort of my couch. I looked at the BIOS screens and it appears that it does have an enable/disable setting in the BIOS which allows the thing to wake up on USB input from state S3. (My remote is a USB remote, BTW.)

I'm guessing that quite a lot of x86 hardware has this same sort of capability, in the BIOS at least, i.e. support for waking up on some USB input while in the S3 state. And I'm also guessing that I'm probably not the only person who has a power hungry x86 HTPC kind of thing and who would also appreciate it if LibreELEC would implement proper support for the both sleep and wake using this S3 state.

P.S. As reported by at least one other guy, i tried using the "Suspend" button in the libreELEC GUI, and the HTPC system -seemed- to kinda sorta shutdown, but then it came right back on again a second or two later.

OK, well, I lied. The real issue isn't really one of power consumption. (I just said that because it seemed simpler than explaining the real issue.)

The real issue is this: I'm trying to get all of my home entertainment toys to work right and play well with my Logitech Harmony 600 remote. And it ain't easy. The Harmony wants to be in control of everything. It wants to be able to turn all relevant components both on and off when initiating and stopping an "activity". I've been wrestling with it for two days straight. It's just a finicky little beast. It just doesn't want to grok the concept that there is some home entertainment component in my arsenal that it cannot turn both on and off, you know, with just IR signals.

So, you know, life would just be a lot simpler if IR signals could put my x86-based HTPC into the S3 state, from which it could be woken up again with another appropriate IR blast.

This isn't about "legacy" hardware. Anybody whose got an x86 HTPC and wants to use a Harmony remote is going to have the same issue, and will be yearning for the same solution, i.e. having the "Off" button on the Harmony put the x86 HTPC into the S3 mode, from whence the Harmony can raise it from the dead again. (And x86 systems are not in any sense "legacy" systems when it comes to running Kodi or OpenELEC or LibreELEC. Believe me, I've tried using Kodi in different ways on ARM harware, and in my experience, it just still isn't nearly as stable and bug-free as running Kodi on x86 is.)

Anyway, even ignoring all that, it seems kinda nuts that the x86 hardware manufacturers went to all this trouble to invent, standardize, and implement this "S3" mode... all obviously for the benefit, specifically, of people wanting to use x86 systems in home entertainment contexts... and then the world's premier x86-compatible media player, i.e. Kodi (personified by LibreELEC in this case) can't even make use of this special hardware mode that was clearly created exactly and specifically for home entertainment purposes and contexts.

P.S. Since you asked, I am currently using libreELEC 7.90.009.

Quote from chewitt

S3 mode works fine when the BIOS/hardware combination supports it (without bugs) and the user configured the BIOS correctly. Most issues are seen when the BIOS is buggy and when the "translated badly from Chinese" BIOS GUI confuses the user (PEBKAC) but we also see cases where hardware doesn't send/keep power to the special USB port during suspend properly (even when the BIOS is configured right) which ensures the receiver never sees the IR wake signals. So no idea what problem you have .. but that's a summary of where things normally break.

OK, lemme fiddle with it some more. My setup is kind of convoluted, but I think that I should be able to tell whether my HTPC is dropping power to the USB ports or not. (If it is, then obviously, as you noted, that's could very well to create a problem.) I guess that I also need to go back, yet one more time, and see if I've mucked up the programming of the Harmony remote. I'm guessing that I may need to re-jigger that to get it to send a proper "suspend" signal, rather than an "off" signal.
[hr]
Hummm.... OK, the depth of the morass that I've navigated myself into is just now beginning to become clear.

There's this whole huge (and very informative) thread over on the Kodi forums about how to get Harmony Remotes properly working with Kodi and, obviously, other home entertainment components at the same time:

HOW TO - Configure a Logitech Harmony Remote for Kodi

It would appear that one of the several problems I may have created for myself was that a long long time ago, when I first started using Kodi, I cheaped out and bought an $12 Ortek VRC-1100 remote... whose IR receiver I am now trying to use with my Harmony 600... rather than buying a real and official $20+ "eHOME RC6" remote. Sigh. My bad. But the VRC-1100 (and its IR receiver) does mostly work, so perhaps all is not lost. And I've just found some more stuff that I can diddle in the Logitech Harmony setup/configuration. So slowly but surely I'm getting to where I want to be with this thing. It's all just much more complicated than I had hoped it would be.

i'm still trying to understand all this, so I have to ask... Those of you who said that you've seen setups where LibreELEC is able to be put into (and then taken out of) the S3 state... can you please tell me exactly which remotes you were using and which buttons you pressed to accomplish that feat? That information might help me to figure out how to get this working also with my own peculiar set of hardware.