Re: Battery status reading problems

[Jan Rychter <jan-JAsPCFd0eodBDgjK7y7TUQ@public.gmane.org>]

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Hartwig Felger:
> Salut Nils,
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Nils Faerber wrote:
> > Am Di, 2003-09-23 um 14.14 schrieb Bas Mevissen:
> > > Alan Cox wrote:
> > > > Several vendors implement the actual battery reading logic as an SMI
> > > > trap and disable interrupts during their slow chat with the battery.
> > > > There isnt much anyone can do about that bit alas (except read it a lot
> > > > less often)
> > > (or does the AC/battery power work with an event? The my assumption
> > > won't hold then)
> I commented on that before!
> 
> > I could very well accept CPU load.
> > I would even accept delays, given they are small.
> > But I experienced kernel hangs, i.e. short periods of no I/O activity at
> > all when querying the battery status. And even that could be acceptable.
> > What was not acceptable were very bizarre happenings that lokked like
> > lost interrupts!? Events that did not cause the reaction they should
> > have. Less severe were lost mouse events but more severe was packet loss
> > on network.
> That are the things that follow from, what Alan is saying - interrupts are
> disabled over some time.
> 
> > So for me it looks more like a bug in the ACPI code than just a
> > performnce issue or hardware misdesign.
> > The other thing that leads to this assumption is that so many of us see
> > this happening, with various notebooks by various manufacturers. It is
> > not bound to certain or limited number of "bad" machines.
> Sorry to tell you, that I have no problems with my Acer TM630. I did try a
> bash-loop with a uspleep 10, always querrying the battery-state, that did
> not consume any interrupts on my maschine. May you collect, what various
> notebooks you claim are affected?

[...]

For the reference, I have always had performance problems with reading
the battery status on my Sharp Mebius. I can't use any "battery applets"
nor cpufreqd because of that -- they eat too much CPU power and cause
the whole machine to slow down.

I got bored with reporting this all over again, and since this issue has
been largely ignored by developers, I decided I can do without battery
information after all.

--J.

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