Bug 129358

Summary: no smart battery ACPI support (e.g. Toshiba Satellite L10-101)
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2 Reporter: Forgotten User wMtT3MV6AL <forgotten_wMtT3MV6AL>
Component: KernelAssignee: Thomas Renninger <trenn>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Minor    
Priority: P5 - None CC: behlert
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: SuSE Linux 10.0   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Forgotten User wMtT3MV6AL 2005-10-19 13:47:25 UTC
My Toshiba Satellite L10-101 doesn't have acpi.
/proc/acpi/battery etc is present, but empty.
Comment 1 Timo Hoenig 2005-10-19 14:01:19 UTC
Actually your system does have ACPI.

Thomas, I had a quick look. No DSDT errors on boot-up, same problem with other kernels (Gentoo).  The ac and battery modules load without any error but they only create empty directories in /proc/acpi/ .
Comment 2 Thomas Renninger 2005-10-19 15:20:34 UTC
Smart Battery system?
I don't actually know how you test whether you have an sbs battery.
Could you please have a look yourself here:
http://powersave.sourceforge.net/powersave/Battery.html#Battery
https://sourceforge.net/projects/sbs-linux/

Could you please tell us how you can determine whether you have an Smart Battery System or not. Thanks.
Comment 3 Timo Hoenig 2005-10-19 15:23:14 UTC
Thomas, even if this system has a smart battery, isn't it strange that the AC adapter does not show up in /proc/acpi?
Comment 6 Thomas Renninger 2005-10-31 09:48:17 UTC
Summary: This is a Smart Battery System and behaves normally with current kernels. Overriding the DSDT makes the SBS work (unfortunately with long reading/writing latencies, but this is normal).
There is a patch from Rich Townsend and Bruno Ducrot that hopefully goes mainline soon. This one introduces a new acpi_sbs module that needs to be loaded. 
I tried to adopt it to our kernels, but the patch is rather big (2900 lines) and I wasn't successful yet. This is nothing for 10.0, anyway. I keep this one open (lowering severity) until above mentioned kernel patch is included in SUSE kernels and working as expected.

I expect we still do not have a Smart Battery System laptop, Stefan? If not, I come back to you Christian, hopefully you can offer your private one for a test as soon as it should work?
Comment 7 Stefan Behlert 2005-11-04 12:29:15 UTC
No, not as far as I know.
Comment 8 Thomas Renninger 2006-08-18 14:06:32 UTC
You may now want to test on a 10.2 kernel to load the sbs kernel module.
Is there apearing something in /proc/acp/battery (this one should also make use of this dir, not sure, though). Does everything work there?
Comment 9 Forgotten User wMtT3MV6AL 2006-08-19 13:38:19 UTC
After the installation of kernel-desktop-2.6.18_rc4-jen32.i586.rpm I have something in /proc/acp/battery
..
toshi:/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1 # ls
alarm  info  state
..
But it seems that this appears without loading the sbs kernel module, could that be?

Comment 10 Thomas Renninger 2006-08-19 13:56:27 UTC
Hmm, strange...
Are the values there sane?
Does something change if you load sbs module or unload it?
Maybe they added a hook that sbs is tried to be loaded by battery module if there is an SBS battery, no idea, need to check.

Does the userspace tools (gnome-powermanager/(k)powersave) work together with this and provide correct values (powersave -b, powersave -B, ...)?
Comment 11 Forgotten User wMtT3MV6AL 2006-08-19 14:32:06 UTC
The output of cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/[alarm|state|info] don't differ with or without sbs loaded.

The userspace tools work with it and provide correct values.

I've changed back to the 2.6.16.21-0.15-default kernel and even here my battery is recognized correct, so the change must be here already.
Comment 12 Thomas Renninger 2006-08-21 07:43:31 UTC
To be honest, I've never seen a smart battery system.
As Timo stated there are no errors in dmesg (which should if you have a normal battery and don't get any output...), I thought you have one.
So there possibly is an other reason why it did not work, I doubt you get a working smart battery without sbs module.
I like to close this one, it's really great that the battery even provides output on SLED10.