SOLVED (?) Ending display sleep on Windows 10 VM


TreyH

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(See below for possibility that this was transient.)

 

I have Windows 10 with a GTX 1080 and USB keyboard and mouse passed-through.

 

I went through and changed all the power settings (never sleep, etc.), but because my display is very bright even when displaying all black (it's a 40-inch ultra wide, so the LED's have a lot of bleed through) I enabled display sleep. It seemed to work, as the screen turned off but Windows network services were still available from other devices... but then I couldn't get it to wake the monitor back up, via keyboard or mouse. From other threads I've searched, it appears this is expected behavior with the only real solution being to get lucky passing through USB controllers (I've already passed through the ones Unraid itself doesn't need).

 

But here's the thing... just playing around, before I did all this, I used the VM manager to pause the VM. I then used a different device to unpause it. When I came back to this machine to look for docs that might help, the old VM manager was still there, still showing the status as "paused". So just for giggles I clicked it and tried to resume—and it worked, the display blinked back to life and I could log back into Windows!

 

But the other device didn't have a 'resume' because it didn't think the VM was sleeping. So... there is absolutely a way to wake from display sleep, maybe not with the keyboard, but it can be done. The Web UI just doesn't expose it in normal operation, since it doesn't show 'resume' when it doesn't think the VM itself is asleep.

 

I'd really like to be able to hit that sleep button and have the monitor stop sucking up watts and bathing the room in light when I'm not using it. Even if I have to use another device to re-wake it. Does anyone have a suggestion for how I might be able to do it?

 

(I guess I could always pause and then resume again, but it seems silly since obviously the pause step isn't strictly necessary.)

Edited by TreyH
Solved, maybe
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For the record, this may have been a “Windows 10 is still settling with updates, etc.” issue—starting about 12 hours after I posted the earlier message, my keyboard has been waking up the display.

 

In that time, I:

  • activated Windows,
  • installed more virtio drivers, 
  • installed the driver for my LG monitor (which I had to download directly from LG’s support site; Windows couldn’t autodetect the monitor as anything but a general plug-and-play monitor, which gave me 800 × 600 resolution on a 3440 × 1440 screen), and
  • installed essential updates (and reboots as needed).

 

So if you’re having this issue, you may want to try this.

Edited by TreyH
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  • TreyH changed the title to SOLVED (?) Ending display sleep on Windows 10 VM

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