can't read battery, dsdt bugged?

Hi, i have a acer laptop (travelmate 4501LCi) and i have installed ubuntu warty 4.10 (kernel 2.6.8.1) the battery applet didnt works... this because /proc/acpi/battery/ is empty!
ps -e | grep acpi

    5 ?        00:00:00 kacpid

3977 ? 00:00:00 acpid

so i disassembled my dsdt to see if i get compiling errors.. i only get 3 warnings. here comes the first question, i got only warning no errors.. so my dsdt is ok or the cause i cant read my battery is those 3 warnings?

i tryed to fix this out, i fix the first, but not the last 2.

first warning:
dsdt.dsl 245: Method (_WAK, 1, NotSerialized)
Warning 2026 - ^ Reserved method must return a value (_WAK)

i fix this adding this line at the end of the involved method Return(Package(0x02){0x00, 0x00})
just before the last }

the others to warning are on the same line:
dsdt.dsl 4508: Method (_STA, 0, NotSerialized)
Warning 2019 - ^ Not all control paths return a value (_STA)

dsdt.dsl 4508: Method (_STA, 0, NotSerialized)
Warning 2026 - ^ Reserved method must return a value (_STA)

this is a big if statment with an else Return (0x08)

i just remove the last else return and i left only the return...

now compiling error are 0. are those fixes correct?
and the most important thing, could those warnings be my problem... if not what should i check?

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you probably have a smart battery. I have an acer travelmate 4001wlmi which has one. There are no smart battery drivers that work in linux.

regards,
pedro venda.

Pedro João Lopes Venda
email: [email protected]
http://arrakis.dhis.org



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it can be a lithium ion AND a smart battery. those are two different concepts:
- Lithium Ion refers to the chemical technology used by the battery.
- the smart battery refers to the way computers interact with the battery. I think there are two types: smart batteries and some other type which name I can't remember (maybe someone could help me here)

it probably is a smart battery, and yes, it's not at all desirable to not be able to read the charge and AC status, but one can live with it... i do.

to see if it's a smart battery or not, i think you must dissassemble your DSDT and look for something like "Name(_HID. EISAID("PNP0C090"))" or "Name(_HID,"ACPI0001")" or "Name(_HID,"ACPI0002")" [some more help here would be appreciated: what is the single line in the dsdt that can tell if one has a smart battery?]. if you find any of those in your dissassembled DSDT, most certainly you have a smart battery.

regards,
pedro venda.

Pedro João Lopes Venda
email: [email protected]
http://arrakis.dhis.org


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SMBus (system management bus) is a physical communication bus which lives in your computer, whether you have a smart battery or not.

to dissassemble your DSDT dmesg or lspci are useless. you need to cat /proc/acpi/dsdt and use iasl to dissassemble the output file. look in the gentoo forum, there is a very good tutorial there.

Usually, I plug it into AC power. if that's impossible, 2 things can happen:
if I have an idea of how long the battery has left... i use it for 3/4 of my estimated time, just to be safe. if I have no idea of how much power the battery has left, I won't use it.

it's not that you can't get it working... it's just that nobody else has written a driver yet. probably smart batteries are not the most widely used batteries...
I am learning and gathering information to start coding, but I don't have enough time to do so in the next few months. also some other people on this list are doing the same. lmsensors people have some 2.4 work... but not enough to make it useful.

regards,
pedro venda.

Pedro João Lopes Venda
email: [email protected]
http://arrakis.dhis.org


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Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now.
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