Re: Should battery generate events?

[Tim Dijkstra <newsuser-TpnWJeB+oO0hKRfeEwdQzg@public.gmane.org>]

On Mon, 04 Oct 2004 15:14:45 -0700
David Bronaugh <dbronaugh-Jp3n8lUXroSX6QiC4yPwbg@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Tim Dijkstra wrote:
>   
> >From some googl'ing I get the impression that ACPI should generate
> >battery events on a change of capacity or at least when it's low. My
> >idea was to have acpid call some script on battery events. 
> >The problem is that there doesn't seem to be such events on my
> >machine. 
> >  
> >
> Whenever polling is required, this is expected to be done in
> userspace, not in kernelspace. There's a long history of people asking
> "why doesn't battery status changes generate events" and a long
> history of people saying "because it would require polling in either
> acpid or the kernel, which is a Bad Thing(tm)".

Hmm, sounds reasonable ... But what do these entries in
/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info mean:

design capacity warning: 30 mAh
design capacity low:     20 mAh

it seems to imply to me that there should be a warning of some kind when
the capacity hits 30 mAh. But if I read your post correctly there is no
such thing?

> If you'd like something to watch the battery capacity, perhaps you 
> should use something like KLaptop -- you can configure it to run a 
> command (like 'echo -n "disk" > /sys/power/state') on low and/or on 
> critical battery level warnings. 

Yeah, but several people log in on this laptop (wife, kid (well not
yet), brothers, sister ...) and that means I have to set up their
desktops and hope they don't accidentally disable it. It seemed a much
cleaner solution to have a gui/user independent process handle it.

It seems I have to hack a little script that polls the battery status
ones in a while and takes appropriate action...

grts Tim 


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