Re: pmu driver

[Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>]

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Alexander Stagun wrote:
> Michael Schmitz wrote:
> > Another battery level reading is available from the battery itself
> > at least on my Powerbook: if the row of LEDs on the battery is down
> > to one and flashing, power really is low. Otherwise, it's still
> > above 5%. Do the more flashy models still have these LEDS?
> 
> The LEDs indicated the same sudden level decrease. Additionally, I
> could reproduce that behaviour under Mac OSX. So now I think, this
> rather is a hardware issue. I called Apple and they will send me a
> replacement battery. We will see then, if it was just a bad battery.

1.5 years ago, I wrote a script to monitor the battery state every minute, and
log it to /var/log. I still have all the data :-)

This is what happens (well, happened half a year ago) when I unpluged the power
(on-line -> off-line):

|   mWh      mV   crit     +       -          MHz   ac   |
| 20430   16712   no      yes     no      545.944 on-line
| 20430   16216   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 20430   15912   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 20430   15792   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 20430   15640   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 20140   14968   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 19980   15288   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 19650   15120   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 19470   15000   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 19320   14912   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 19100   14808   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 18850   14712   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 18600   14632   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 18420   14544   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 18110   14320   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 17840   14344   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 17620   14272   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 17210   14184   no      no      yes     545.944 off-line
| 0       14136   yes     no      yes     545.944 off-line

As soon as `crit' goes to `yes', I had a few more minutes to shutdown the
machine. However, these days the power state becomes critical after an uptime
of 4 minutes, and I don't have time for a clean shutdown anymore :-(

Note that this is not on a PowerBook, but on a Vaio, with LiIon battery. And
it's definitely the battery, since so far it doesn't happen with the (larger)
spare one.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds