APM battery status reporting

APM battery status reporting

[Dennis Noordsij]

Hi,

I have a Dell Inspiron 5000e laptop which works beautifully with 2.4.2, 
including suspends, DRM, etc etc.

One thing that has never worked though is battery status reporting 
(/proc/apm). However people who sell this exact same laptop with Linux 
preinstalled (mostly redhat though with their patched kernel, I use Debian 
with stock kernel) tell me their battery status reporting does indeed work. 
Via google.com/linux I have found several older posts in this list (Q4 2000) 
mentioning this exact laptop and patches that do enable this feature being 
tested in previous kernels. Then again my dmesg says the BIOS is probably 
buggy (same BIOS though as mentioned in those posts). Apmd does notice the 
change from mains to battery and vice versa (I have disabled Speedstep so now 
everything actually survives this transition :-).

So to end all the confusion, is there a patch out there that enables battery 
status reporting for me (and other Dell owners :-) ?

Thanks in advance for any pointers,
Kind regards,
Dennis Noordsij

dmesg:

BIOS strings suggest APM bugs, disabling power status reporting.
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.14)


kernel configuration:

CONFIG_APM=y
CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_USER_SUSPEND=y
# CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE is not set
# CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE is not set
# CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK is not set
CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y
CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS=y
CONFIG_APM_REAL_MODE_POWER_OFF=y

# CONFIG_ACPI is not set


/proc/apm:

1.14 1.2 0x03 0xff 0xff 0xff -1% -1 ?

Re: APM battery status reporting

[Alan Cox]

> tested in previous kernels. Then again my dmesg says the BIOS is probably 
> buggy (same BIOS though as mentioned in those posts). Apmd does notice the 
> change from mains to battery and vice versa (I have disabled Speedstep so now 
> everything actually survives this transition :-).
> So to end all the confusion, is there a patch out there that enables battery 
> status reporting for me (and other Dell owners :-) ?

Yes but the update you need is a new BIOS revision. Ask Dell 

Re: APM battery status reporting

[Tom Sightler]

> > tested in previous kernels. Then again my dmesg says the BIOS is
probably
> > buggy (same BIOS though as mentioned in those posts). Apmd does notice
the
> > change from mains to battery and vice versa (I have disabled Speedstep
so now
> > everything actually survives this transition :-).
> > So to end all the confusion, is there a patch out there that enables
battery
> > status reporting for me (and other Dell owners :-) ?
>
> Yes but the update you need is a new BIOS revision. Ask Dell
>

The BIOS update has been around forever from Compal (the people who actually
OEM the unit for Dell), you can get their generic BIOS at
http://software.tuxtops.com. This probably violates your Dell warranty but I
know many who use it and we've now installed it on all the 5000e systems we
own, without any problem.

I'm not sure why Dell is taking so long to get an update to it consumers,
but it probably has something to do with the fact that Linux isn't a
supported platform on this machine.  Their official stance appears to be
"APM isn't supported on this laptop, only ACPI."  That's pretty bogus since
everything but this one system call works, and even that works with the
Compal generic BIOS, so I'd more likely guess it's just not high on the
priority list because it's not important enough for their largest user base
which is of course Windows.

Later,
Tom