battery state

[Ian Smith]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:40:26 +0200, Dominic Fandrey wrote:
 > On 15/08/2012 11:16, Niclas Zeising wrote:
 > > On 2012-08-15 11:07, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
 > > > On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Dominic Fandrey
 > > > <kamikaze at bsdforen.de>wrote:
 > > > > On 15/08/2012 10:40, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
 > > > > > On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Dominic Fandrey
 > > > > > <kamikaze at bsdforen.de
 > > > > > > wrote:
 > > > > > > For a while now "acpiconf -i0" always shows the battery state that
 > > > > > > was correct when booting the system. It's never updated.
 > > > > > > 
 > > > > > It wont solve the problem, but does the sysctl hw.acpi.battery.time
 > > > > > update
 > > > > > correctly?
 > > > > > 
 > > > > 
 > > > > Thanks for the fast reply, right now it shows -1 (the system was
 > > > > plugged
 > > > > in during boot).
 > > > > 
 > > > > I just unplugged it and it still shows -1:
 > > > > 
 > > > > > sysctl hw.acpi.battery
 > > > > > 
 > > > > hw.acpi.battery.life: 99
 > > > > hw.acpi.battery.time: -1
 > > > > hw.acpi.battery.state: 0
 > > > > hw.acpi.battery.units: 2
 > > > > hw.acpi.battery.info_expire: 5
 > > > 
 > > > Sounds like there is some acpi-problem then. On my thinkpad it takes
 > > > maybe
 > > > five seconds for it to go from -1 to an estimate. Also
 > > > hw.acpi.battery.state=0 for me equals "AC plugged in and battery full".
 > > 
 > > Just a short "aol".  I'm seeing the same issue, also on a HP laptop, a
 > > HP 6910p with a Core2Duo 2.0GHz processor (can't remember the exact
 > > model).  It has been this way for as long as I can remember (at least a
 > > year), but I haven't checked into the matter more closely.
 > 
 > There was a time when this actually worked for me. I should have
 > reacted instantly when the problem came up, but I had a race car
 > to build ... FSAE.

I found your correspondence here last December about that, "Re: battery 
display broken".  Looks like it's still the same problem, you were on 
9-stable then too.  When did it used to work?

On either normal or verbose boot messages, are there any ACPI errors 
logged?  This smells a bit like some of the Embedded Controller issues 
that were coming up late 2010, most resolved by some patches by avg at .

Someone then worked around some EC issue using debug.acpi.ec.polled mode 
rather than relying on notifications, I vaguely recall.  You said then 
you run only one battery, so hw.acpi.battery.units is also still wrong?

 > >  Are you
 > > running the latest current?  I haven't updated in a while, so perhaps
 > > the issue has been resolved...
 > 
 > Nay, I stick to the RELENG_ branches. I'll switch to RELENG_10
 > shortly before a 10.0 release.

If there's any indication of ACPI errors on boot (or later) this would 
be worthy of a PR, especially as you're not alone in this, on HP gear.  
I suppose you've checked HP for any more recent BIOS &/or EC updates?

cheers, Ian