Re: Bugs on aspire one A150

From: Maxim Levitsky
Date: Wed Nov 12 2008 - 12:49:01 EST


Alan Jenkins wrote:
Maxim Levitsky wrote:
Alan Jenkins wrote:
Maxim Levitsky wrote:
I have just bought an Aspire one A150, XP version,
as it was the only available here, and installed ubuntu on it.

Bugs I discovered so far:


** 1 - embedded controler works in polling mode, due to this:

[ 0.708571] ACPI: EC: non-query interrupt received, switching to
interrupt mode
[ 1.224043] ACPI: EC: missing confirmations, switch off interrupt
mode.


Maybe this is the reason for the fact that gnome power manager
freezes when I unplug
the AC, and freezes often when I try to see battery status.


(Note: same is seen on my acer aspire 5720)
That sounds like a known issue. It has been resolved by "ACPI: EC:
revert msleep patch". Happily Len submitted it for mainline this
week. You will also find it if you try the acpi-test git tree. We're all hoping 2.6.28 will be much improved in terms of reliable
operation of different ECs :).

Yes, this almost fixes all issues with that.
Almost because, it looks like the EC changes screen brightness on his
own when battery is plugged/unplugged,
but so does the gnome-power-manager, and thus it still hangs as before
on battery removal (but doesn't hang otherwise)
I disabled that behaver in gnome-power-manager and now no more hangs.


Please do report it as an ACPI EC bug. It's popular hardware, and if
nothing else it is important that upstream be aware of the workarounds
people are having to use.

I see that this fix fixes the polled mode. Any chance to make irq mode
work?


Probably not. It doesn't seem important, it may not be possible, and
even if you could fix the EC driver for your hardware, there's the risk
of breaking other peoples hardware.

The presumption is that you have weird hardware and it genuinely needs a
polling workaround. It's not too bad, now it uses udelay() it should
not impose any wakeups or significant latency, just some extra cpu time
in a busy loop. EC events such as acpi hotkeys are still received as
interrupts (although we then have to query the type of event using a
polled transaction).


I assume you get something like (text not exact):

"EC: started in polling mode"
...
"EC: non-query interrupt received, switching to interrupt mode"
...
"EC: missing confirmations, switching to polling mode"

all during boot.
Yes, this is what I see.



There's one outstanding issue on a different machine, where the
occasional EC read fails and triggers polling mode sometime _after_
boot. It can be fixed by retrying the transaction

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11896

but I don't really expect your machine has the same problem.

<snip non-acpi problems>

Also noticed another bug:


If I suspend/resume with compiz running, on resume I see wallpaper and
mouse cursor, everything hangs for minute or two, and sometimes forever.

2.6.27 worked fine.

Weird.

Did you try sysrq-W during the hang? That's supposed to dump a list of
blocked tasks to dmesg.
Well, I see the wallpaper and can move the mouse, I will try to suspend from console
I think this is graphics bug.
nether ctrl+alt+bks nor SAK kill X.

After 2 minute wait, kernel log doesn't show anything unusual.
printk times, jump that 2 minutes around wireless association, but I tested it without ath5k loaded
and still the same happens.

Also if I disable compiz, everything resumes correctly, and instantly.


Also hibernate doesn't work on my main notebook, but it is probably
fixed, I update kernel to really latest -git
and tell you.


But suspend to ram works? Usually it is the other way round :). If you
haven't already, you might read

Documentation/power/basic-pm-debugging.txt

Well, this is long story
details at http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/20/75
speaking shortly, bios doesn't pass control to kernel on second resume.
Thus I don't test it, but I see how it works now.

Suspend to disk still doesn't work.
First of all system hangs in the end of image writeout.
If I power it down manually, and boot, system resumes from disk, and then hangs.
2.6.27 works fine.

(This is about my main notebook)


it suggests some tests to narrow down the problem.

Big thanks for bugfixes, you saved me a lot of work and bisecting.


I can't take credit for actual fixes. But I'm very happy to help people
avoid bisecting for known problems. I hope you have time to crack the
unknown ones :).

Alan


Best regards,
Maxim Levitsky


PS: sorry for late reply
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/