ACPI Testing

[D. D. Brierton]

I'm posting this here as opposed to fedora-list as this is a call to
arms for any and all of us Fedora users who are trying to get ACPI to
work on their laptops. ACPI needs testing, and lots of feedback on what
is working and what isn't. Whilst it is true that FC has ACPI enabled by
default and we we are therefore in the perfect situation to generate
lots of useful feedback which can be passed on to the developers, I
don't think that anyone thinks that ACPI is 100% usable as is. If anyone
thinks that this list is not the appropriate forum for this discussion
then I am happy to move it to another (maybe the ACPI mailing list?) but
only when we have gathered together a sufficient number of testers.
However, I will say that my primary motivation is to galvanise a group
of testers into action specifically to help with ACPI in Fedora who are
willing to download and try out packages from Rawhide and who want to
contribute whatever scripts they have so that they might one day end up
either in Fedora Core or Fedora Extras.

Please reply to this thread with your experiences, good or bad.

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Some additional information:

My Hardware (for reference):

Dell Inspiron 8200, NVidia GeForce 440GO (with 64MB VRAM), 1GB RAM, BIOS
A10 (an update to A11 is available but I haven't installed it yet).
Intersil Prism 2 Wi-Fi PCMCIA card. USB mouse and printer. FireWire
external hard drive.

My software:

Currently using nv driver, but keen to use nvidia driver when an FC2
compatible driver comes out.

My experience:

Precious little with power management until this week! I've had this
laptop for nearly two years now, and it's proved an excellent Linux
machine -- everything except the winmodem worked out of the box. But
when I installed Linux on it two years ago I looked into power
management, read about ACPI not being supported yet, and read about all
the hoops you had to jump trough to get APM suspend to work (patching
NVidia drivers, creating a special s2d partition) and thought to myself
"forget it, I'll just wait until the 2.6 kernel comes out". Since
installing FC2 I've spent a good deal of this week trying to learn what
I can. Google turns up lots, and tldp.org has these:

ACPI-HOWTO 
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/ACPI-HOWTO/index.html

Battery-Powered-HOWTO
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Battery-Powered/index.html

Laptop-HOWTO
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Laptop-HOWTO.html

Also there is lots of information at http://acpi.sourceforge.net/.

However, apart from the latter site, quite a lot of the information
available (especially for my laptop, given that it is two years old) is
quite out of date given what ships in FC2.

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Some questions:

1. At the moment, both APM and ACPI start at boot. I didn't configure it
this way. This is a clean install of FC2 and this is what anaconda set
up. It seems that both are started as services, although whilst apmd
returns OK at boot it seems somewhat silent on its status:

# chkconfig --list acpid
acpid           0:off   1:off   2:off   3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

# chkconfig --list apmd
apmd            0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

# service acpid status
acpid (pid 2248) is running...

# service apmd status
#

Do I actually want both running at the same time? I assume that for
testing purposes I should disable APM, but I'd like to hear from someone
who knows what he's talking about.

2. I had read that 2.6 supports suspending to disk, and that it uses
swap space for that and so I ensured that my swap partition is greater
than the size of my RAM + VRAM. Is that correct?

3. Does FC2 automatically go into "laptop" mode when I pull out the
power cord, or do I have to do something manually? (I can't find now
where I read about this, but I believe "laptop" mode is something new in
the 2.6 kernel which preserves battery life by slowing the CPU speed and
reducing disk activity.)

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Personal (ideal world) goal for ACPI:

What I guess I'd like ideally would be for both suspend to ram and
suspend to disk to work (whether I'm in X or not), for closing and
opening the lid of the laptop to trigger suspending to ram and resuming
from ram, and for suspend to disk to happen automatically when battery
level become critically low.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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