Anyways, there’s two things you have to do as root (sudo su -), the first is create a file in /etc/pm/config.d called modules:

In /etc/pm/config.d/modules put the following text:

SUSPEND_MODULES="ath_pci"

This is a space separated list of modules to unload during suspend. In this case, I have told it to remove ath_pci, the atheros pci wifi module. Additionally, I could add any other modules that don’t behave well during suspend/resume.

Unfortunately, this does NOT reload the module when the system is resumed. This is the second thing you’ll have to do to get the wifi working. Create a file in /etc/pm/sleep.d called 01ath.sh (The name is really arbitrary, that’s just what I named it. And, technically, it’s not arbitrary, the scripts in this directory are executed in alphabetical order, so 01Something.sh would get called before 02Something.sh)

In /etc/pm/sleep.d/01ath.sh write the following script:

#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
resume)
/sbin/modprobe ath_pci
;;
thaw)
/sbin/modprobe ath_pci
;;
esac

Then run chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/o1ath.sh to ensure that the script is executable. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have your Atheros wifi card coming back up from suspend/hibernate with no problems :)

The above script is called every time the system enters one of the four sleep states: suspend, resume, hibernate, thaw. In this case, the module is already unloaded by our parameter we specified in config.d/modules. We could have very easily set up the script to do it all, and just use one script as follows:

#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
hibernate)
/sbin/modprobe -r ath_pci
;;
suspend)
/sbin/modprobe -r ath_pci
;;
resume)
/sbin/modprobe ath_pci
;;
thaw)
/sbin/modprobe ath_pci
;;
esac

Should you chose to do it this way, you don’t need the /etc/pm/config.d/modules file, as this script will remove the module (and any that it pulled in that aren’t needed anymore, see the manpage for modprobe.) That may actually be a better solution, because modprobing ath_pci pulls in a few other wifi related modules.

If you want to know more technical details, there’s the pm-utils wiki page from openSUSE which is how I figured this out. Also there’s the main pm-utils page.