2007/8/7, Tim Hull <thully@umich.edu>:
ok, I'll try that this evening. That is to say, I already run an unstable debian, so I don't know if your procedure is still necessary (sorry, I forgot to tell that I run a debian sid in my previous mails).
On sid, you don't have to do any of the kernel recompilation. Things should "just work".
Unfortunately, it doesn't ;).
I already did this. This is a nice little program and I followed all suggestions (most of them forced me to recompile my kernel), but this didn't change anything.
Did Powertop show any frequency scaling going on, or was your system permanently running at its full frequency? You may want to try it with the Debian kernel again - it never asked me to recompile my kernel, and it did manage to find that frequency scaling was turned off.
All what Powertop says is to configure some properties to scal down the processor wake-ups; which I did. An info message also says on top of the powertop window that no power management information is available.
The system is scalable though; I managed to scal down the processor's speed as I wish; but no battery detection.
What is wiered is that the power management applet detects whether or not the system runs on battery or not; but no time left estimation and no power management of the battery is available; it simply says battery or not battery.
I think, I should work and I forgot either to load an acpi module (which would surprise me; acpi_cpufreq, ac and battery are loaded as well as governors) or the power management program I use is not able to manage this type of battery (I tried cpufreqd, powersaved, powernowd and powertweakd).
What do you think?
Is this still to test since I run a debian sid? Can it be that the power management works well on testing and not with sid?
Btw, I tried the 2.6.22 precompiled kernel from sid too, but it did not work better.
No, sid should work as well as (if not better than) testing. I'm wondering if this is just an issue with the very newest MacBooks (I have a first-generation one, and it works fine). You shouldn't have to recompile the kernel in any case with
2.6.22.
Yes, perhaps; mine is a second-generation macbook. Perhaps I'll have to wait.
Where can I go from there?
One thing you could try is adding acpi_cpufreq and cpufreq_ondemand to /etc/modules.
This was already the case
That may enable frequency scaling if its disabled. Also, make sure all the ACPI-related packages are installed by running "tasksel" and making sure "Laptop" is selected.
This was already done at install time.
Alex