power management not working? (laptop, puppy 1.05)

[deshlab]

hey,

if you check the forum for info about power management and acpi you arrive at pakt's post from Sep 23 http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=14731#14731 and his problem:

After booting Puppy 1.0.5RC on my Dell Inspiron 510m (pressed return, ie option 1),I installed G2's new wmpower.pup, ran it in rxvt and got:

# wmpower

Welcome to wmpower version 0.3.1...
No power management subsystem detected

wmpower: No power management support...

Hmmm...what's this? Kanotix has no problem activating APCI on this laptop.
Am I forgetting something or doing something wrong?

I've done the same on my acer aspire 1300 and got the same message.
questions:
- is this the only way to check if power management is enabled?
- if power management is really disabled/not supported ->why?
- does disabled power management mean that my cpu is running at full blast all the time (which would explain the near-constant fan blowing)?

thanks,
dshlb

ps: adding a funky poll to see if this affects many users

[pakt]

I'm glad deshlab brought this subject up again as I never did get a response to my post (see the quote in deshlab's post above).

I hope someone can provide an answer to why power management doesn't seem to work in Puppy .

[willhunt]

you could always use the power mangement located in the
bios I do

[deshlab]

you could always use the power mangement located in the
bios I do

thanks for the answer!
sadly this is not an option on many laptops as the creators limited the bios functions. on my one for example all that can be done via the bios is setting the clock and the order of the boot devices.

[pakt]

you could always use the power mangement located in the
bios I do

willhunt, thanks for your suggestion but the BIOS in my Dell Inspiron 510m with a Pentium M 725 'Dothan' CPU ('Centrino' but with 802.11b/g wlan) has only the following option on the BIOS "Power Management page" (with the most recent BIOS version A11):

Intel SpeedStep [Enabled | Disabled]

If SpeedStep is enabled, which it is, (paraphrasing from the BIOS info) "it enables the native operating system driver to adjust the system performance".

In other words, it is up to Linux or specifically Puppy here to provide the power management driver. Kanotix, which is what I normally run on my laptop, loads a 'Centrino' driver that 'works out of the box' adjusting the fan speed and CPU frequency according to the load. No configuration was necessary, it just worked.

Unfortunately, I don't know much about kernel configuration or power management drivers which is why I posted in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me could look into this and give some pointers. I'm sure there are others running Puppy on laptops that could benefit.

Some excerpts from lsmod when running Kanotix:

speedstep_centrino 6868 1
freq_table 3332 1 speedstep_centrino
thermal 10888 0
processor 15788 2 speedstep_centrino,thermal
fan 3332 0
button 5136 0
battery 8324 0
ac 3588 0

Any suggestions are welcome

[deshlab]

Bump. Has anybody new thoughts about solving this issue under the current puppy versions? or will we have to wait til puppy is based on a more recent kernel which supports acpi better?

i'll repeat: it's a major let down to use puppy on such unsupported lap tops because you are used to hear hardly more than harddisk sounds from time to time under windows or other linuxes (kanotix, cpx mini and probably many others) and then use puppy and have the thing heat up to unhealthy levels accompanied by near-constant full throttle fan blowing.

i understand there are issues with the 2.6 kernel concerning instability and data loss on ntfs disks - but using 2.4 (on my fat32 btw) and living with the fear of hardware loss is not really an option. which frustrates me since puppy is the first linux distribution that really seems to match my ideas about the whole get rid of windows thing (unlike knoppix, ubuntu and similar 'osxp clones'). :cry:

creating future releases of puppy on both the stable 2.4.x kernel and the "riskier" 2.6.x would be very much appreciated. i hope it's not too much of an effort asked and wished i had the knowledge (and time) to contribute something to that.

thanks for reading

[BlackAdder]

According to an ACPI HowTo, it is set up during boot with the creation of a DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) which - I think - is derived from the system BIOS. The HowTo implies that this should work with the Puppy 2.4.29 kernel. A message flashes past during the boot of my ASUS L8400B about APM being over-ridden by ACPI, but wmpower says that there is "no power management support" .
So it seems that ACPI may not be properly initialised under Puppy, for my notebook anyway. The ACPI parameters have been enabled in the kernel.

ACPI works correctly using Xandros on the same machine, although that is based on a 2.6 series kernel. Xandros shows items like the CPU temperature and battery state during bootup. It has an additional driver asus_acpi that is not in the Puppy kernel, and that may make the diffference. There is also a toshiba_acpi driver that Puppy does not have either.
It may need an updated kernel to get ACPI functioning properly with these notebooks.

[BlackAdder]

These are the results of some experimentation.
After booting Puppy, a check of /proc/acpi shows only a couple of folders.
There are five modules in /lib/modules/2.4.29/acpi - ac; battery; fan; processor; thermal. Since my principal interest is in ensuring that the processor does not overheat, the following was tried:

Code: Select all

#modprobe thermal
#modprobe processor
#modprobe fan
#echo 10 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/polling_frequency

The last command is needed because otherwise polling is disabled.
This sequence did set up ACPI - as evidenced by the appearance of additional folders under /proc/acpi, and it seems to be working correctly. The following command displays the processor temperature:

Code: Select all

#cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/temperature

In my case, the temperature stays well below the threshold of 70c, so the fan does not cycle as it does with Windows XP.

torsmo claims to be able to monitor ACPI temperature, but I have not been able to make it do that yet. wmpower still says that there is no power management support. It seems reasonable to believe that the modprobes could be added to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

Could someone else who is having trouble with ACPI try the above commands and let us know the results, please?

[distortedstar]

Tried checking the temp with your method, and it worked great on my inspiron 8200. The fan has been working anyways, though. I'm really interested in gettinga reading on my battery so I know how much power I have left. Not sure how to do that though...

[distortedstar]

added modprobe battery and modprobe thermal to my rc.local. Then enabled the outputs in torsmo...voila. Problem solved.

[pakt]

BlackAdder, just read your post. You've made good progress in solving this problem and I'll be happy to test it. Will get back to you...

UPDATE: Sorry for the delay in answering (storm blew over a tree that took out our telephone line )

I modprobed all five modules (thermal, processor, fan, battery and ac). wmpower now works showing the laptop on AC, battery time left, processor temperature, etc . Thanks BlackAdder for providing the solution.

Next question: Does wmpower actually change running parameters (processor frequency/voltage) according to load, or is it just a monitoring program? Do I need another program for that?

[Paolo]

added modprobe battery and modprobe thermal to my rc.local. Then enabled the outputs in torsmo...voila. Problem solved.

Greetings ! My name is Paolo and I'm a new user of Puppy.
I've too a laptop (dell latitude c600 ) and I like to configure torsmo for see the battery level.
Please can you post your configuration file of torsmo because i don't have understand how to enable the outputs in torsmo
Thanx,
Paolo

[deshlab]

1st of all: THANKS to BlackAdder! after modprobing following his instructions my notebook is no longer noising at me all the time and i can finally use puppy again
it's still getting warmer than under use in winxp, but it does not run as hot as before - plus i can now see the temperature and understand the occasional fan activity. just great!

2nd: @ Paolo: to make the battery level appear in my torsmo i did the following:

• 1-rightclick on torsmo icon in /root/my-roxapps, click on App dir 'Torsmo'->Configure Torsmo (torsmorc-eth opens in beaver)
  2-scroll down to the end of the torsmorc-eth (after 'TEXT') and add the line

  Code: Select all

   ${color lightblue}battery${color grey}            ${battery}

  (the $color tags can be customized to your liking of course)
  3-save torsmorc-eth and close it.
  4-close torsmo by clicking the icon, restart torsmo by clicking the icon

i hope this helps you. other variables like cpu temperature (acpitemp) can be included likewise.

[Guest]

added modprobe battery and modprobe thermal to my rc.local. Then enabled the outputs in torsmo...voila. Problem solved.

Excuse me,I've forget to say:
I use Puppy 1.0.6
what I must do with modprobes ?
Can someone post a step-to-step how-to?
Excuse but I'm totally newbie with this kind of situation.

@Deshlab:
Thanks for your response.
Goodbye,
Paolo

[BlackAdder]

You should be able to check if ACPI is operational or not in following way:

• Open an RXVT window (Start>Run>Rxvt terminal window, or click on the Console icon). Then type:

  Code: Select all

  wmpower

  If you get a message to the effect that there is no power management support then ACPI is probably not operational on your machine.
  In the RXVT window type the following:

Code: Select all

modprobe ac
modprobe battery
modprobe thermal
modprobe processor
modprobe fan
echo 10 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency

This should work on most notebook machines, but does assume a single thermal zone.
You could then check if wmpower works, as follows:

Code: Select all

wmpower -no-meddling &

That should open a little window showing status.
If wmpower does not work, you can see the current temperature by typing this in the rxvt window:

Code: Select all

cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/temperature

If this all works, the modprobes and echo command can be put into rc.local in the following way:

• Open Rox-filer (e.g. by clicking on the Home icon).
  Navigate to /etc/rc.d
  Right click on rc.local and select open as text
  Add the modprobes and echo
  Save the file.
  Reboot to activate.

Hope this helps.

[BlackAdder]

pakt asked a question about wmpower. It is now working on my machine. Some settings can be changed, wmpower --help gives some insights, and there is more on the wmpower web site.
There are some other ACPI-related kernel parameters that I have not yet tried, such as acpi=noirq. On my notebook ACPI is shown as sharing IRQ 10 with other things. Might be worth a try.
Cannot test Intel Speedstep on this machine (Celeron 550MHz) - not supported on Celeron, but ACPI is supposed to be able to throttle back the processor when running Speedstep processors on battery.
There is another thread in which kethd was concerned about the hard disk running constantly. He identified the check_space process as the cause. Killing that process allows the disk to spin down. Using hdparm -s 5 does it for me, but it is worth remembering that check_space performs a useful function and turning it off should be a considered decision. The machine runs cooler and the battery lasts longer when the hard disk is not running, of course.

[Paolo]

Thanks BlackAdder,now all works very well.
This code:
''echo 10 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency ''
creating problem on my laptop (dell latitude c600),and without this line all
is OK.
Thanks for all,
Paolo

[BlackAdder]

Paolo,
You may find that the thermal zone on some laptops is not called "THRM", but "THM". You can check by using Rox to look at /proc/acpi/thermal zone. Why is this so? I guess that is the way the manufacturer set it up.

[pakt]

Thanks BlackAdder, I will give your tips a try.

[BlackAdder]

Just in case those watching this thread did not see Barry's note on 19 December, it is quoted below. The change can be expected in 1.0.7

I have modified /root/.xinitrc so that check_space will only be launched if free space in "/" is less than 20M. Thus, check_space will only run in very tight situations, such as running in a 128M-RAM PC with no swap partition. It will not run in a hard-drive-installed Puppy, as "/" is the entire hard drive partition which is bound to have more than 20M free (besides which, the full h.d. install doesn't use a ramdisk).