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Acer Aspire 7720 shutdown problems and DSDT fixes

DISCUSSION Bernhard Rosenkränzer 3 participants 3 messages Aug 24, 2008 ACPI

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Hi,
I recently got an Acer Aspire 7720 using BIOS 1.43. Obviously, the first thing to do was install Linux (currently running 2.6.27-rc4).

Everything is working, but under heavy load, the machine tends to shut down without prior warning. Unlike the similar problem described at
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9167, /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ01/temperature does show the correct temperature all the time, and the fan does turn on.

I've looked at the DSDT and found a huge number of obvious bugs (_OSC taking the wrong number of arguments and actually having an off-by-one bug when looking at the arguments -- looks like someone didn't know ACPI arguments start at Arg0 and then increased the argument count by 1 so he could get the 4th argument in Arg4; Funny comparisons like
If (LOr (LGreater (OSYS, 0x07D0), LLess (OSYS, 0x07D7)))
(not that that could ever not be true...); doesn't even compile.....), but fixing them doesn't help.

I've tried all sorts of things to get it to behave, including patching the DSDT to actually know about the fact that TZ01 is connected to the CPUs and throttling the CPUs may help:

            Method (_PSV, 0, Serialized)
            {
                Return (3552) // 3552 = (273.2+82.0)*10
            }

            Method (_PSL, Package() {
                \_PR.CPU0,
                \_PR.CPU1
            })

            Name (_TC1, 3)
            Name (_TC2, 4)
            Name (_TSP, 20)
            Name (_TZP, Zero)

(This part works nicely by the way)

But at some point, it still shuts down.

Looking at sensors output, the box seems to shut down when it hits 85.0°C, which is also what the coretemp module thinks is right (tjmax value) -- but the DSDT sets the trip point at 110°C:

            Method (_CRT, 0, Serialized)
            {
                Return (Add (0x0AAC, Multiply (0x6E, 0x0A)))
            }

Guess this explains why I'm getting a sudden shutdown instead of a clean shutdown through acpid - adjusting _CRT to return 84°C doesn't fix the problem, but does let acpid shut down the system gracefully instead of just going down.

However, given that's what the DSDT says, my guess is the box has actually been designed to run at 110°C and simply shouldn't be shutting down at 85°C without warning - any ideas what may be causing this or how to fix it?

The DSDTs are available at
http://arklinux.org/~bero/dsdt-acer.dsl (Original DSDT)
http://arklinux.org/~bero/dsdt-bugfixes.dsl (Bugfixed version)
http://arklinux.org/~bero/dsdt-newfeatures.dsl (Version with CPU throttling etc.)
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#1 lore raw
Quoted 50 lines · Bernhard Rosenkränzer

Hi,
I recently got an Acer Aspire 7720 using BIOS 1.43. Obviously, the first thing to do was install Linux (currently running 2.6.27-rc4).

Everything is working, but under heavy load, the machine tends to shut down without prior warning. Unlike the similar problem described at
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9167, /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ01/temperature does show the correct temperature all the time, and the fan does turn on.

I've looked at the DSDT and found a huge number of obvious bugs (_OSC taking the wrong number of arguments and actually having an off-by-one bug when looking at the arguments -- looks like someone didn't know ACPI arguments start at Arg0 and then increased the argument count by 1 so he could get the 4th argument in Arg4; Funny comparisons like
If (LOr (LGreater (OSYS, 0x07D0), LLess (OSYS, 0x07D7)))
(not that that could ever not be true...); doesn't even compile.....), but fixing them doesn't help.

I've tried all sorts of things to get it to behave, including patching the DSDT to actually know about the fact that TZ01 is connected to the CPUs and throttling the CPUs may help:

            Method (_PSV, 0, Serialized)
            {
                Return (3552) // 3552 = (273.2+82.0)*10
            }

            Method (_PSL, Package() {
                \_PR.CPU0,
                \_PR.CPU1
            })

            Name (_TC1, 3)
            Name (_TC2, 4)
            Name (_TSP, 20)
            Name (_TZP, Zero)

(This part works nicely by the way)

But at some point, it still shuts down.

Looking at sensors output, the box seems to shut down when it hits 85.0°C, which is also what the coretemp module thinks is right (tjmax value) -- but the DSDT sets the trip point at 110°C:

            Method (_CRT, 0, Serialized)
            {
                Return (Add (0x0AAC, Multiply (0x6E, 0x0A)))
            }
Quoted 9 lines

Guess this explains why I'm getting a sudden shutdown instead of a clean shutdown through acpid - adjusting _CRT to return 84°C doesn't fix the problem, but does let acpid shut down the system gracefully instead of just going down.

However, given that's what the DSDT says, my guess is the box has actually been designed to run at 110°C and simply shouldn't be shutting down at 85°C without warning - any ideas what may be causing this or how to fix it?

In theory they sell a version with Linux preinstalled, and are interested in engaging with Linux generally. Maybe you can find the kernel version, patches & Kconfig and see if their kernel is any better.

Alan
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#2 lore raw
Quoted 3 lines · On Sunday 24 August 2008 18:48:57 Alan Jenkins wrote:

In theory they sell a version with Linux preinstalled, and are interested in engaging with Linux generally. Maybe you can find the kernel version, patches & Kconfig and see if their kernel is any better.

The "version" they ship is Linpus Linux, without even X configured, in the expectation that people are just going to wipe that and put Windows on.

Quoted 1 line

From what I've seen, Acer just aren't that interested in Linux[1].

-Carlos

[1] The Aspire One seems to be the first and only exception to this so far.

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