[ltp] Re: T40p Crashing

[John Goerzen]

Ramon Casellas <casellas@infres.enst.fr> writes:

> According to my personal experience (and some mails from people having
> similar problems, from acpi.sf.net and lkml) here's what I would say :
> it's not the best moment to play around with 2.6.0 + Power Management +
> Thinkpads, they do not mix very well...Yet! Of course, this may only apply
> to some models, or maybe I've been particularly clumsy, but,

Is there a good place where I could go to help out the development,
other than LKML?

> Basically, unless you have a good reason (and regarding only power
> management!) stick with a well tested 2.4.2X + APM. I'm usually using
> 2.6.0, but that's because in some aspects 2.6.0 is really better, but not
> power management.

I've found interactive response on 2.4.x to be rather poor, and
seemingly getting worse with the newer kernels, especially with
several disk-bound processes.  This, as well as IPv6, are my main
motivations for going to 2.6 (apparently the IPv6 support is much more
complete with current standards there).

> * APM/ACPI: According to some reports, kernel-2.4.21-acX was quite stable
> in this sense (ACPI or APM). Thinkpad users (including myself) were able

I seem to recall trying to use ACPI in 2.4 some while back and
experienced lockups on boot there as well.  However, my memory may be
wrong.

> * ACPI: Later kernels 2.4.22 - 23pre3 IIRC (which include ACPI
> versions previous to the very latest one, 20030916), did not work with
> newer thinkpads (or with older if you happened to have a particular newer
> BIOS version). This was the quite common AE_TIME error,...ACPI was
> unusable for these versions.

Ah ha, so my memory was right :-)

> * ACPI : kernels 2.4.22 - 2.6/0-test5 before 2.6.0-test5-bk8 IIRC need
> external patches in order to correctly detect the embedded controller
> found in recent thinkpads. <2.6.0-test5-mm4 need another patch (see

What particular embedded controller is this?

> acpi-devel mailing list or lkml). this is a well known issue, reported by
> Ruben Puettman in osdl.


>> * 2.6.0-test5 crashes on boot when compiled with ACPI.
>
> Use mm3 or mm4, there are some patches (regarding IRQ routing, if you get
> something lile "calculating ACPI/IRQ penalities; or lots of debug messages
> BAT0...) this is the kernel I'm using.

Will try.

> Do not get me wrong. These coders are doing and excellent work, and I
> don't want to sound like a just-a-user-complaining. I know the "here's the
> code, code it yourself" motto, but I'm just sharing my experiences...

Understood, and it's much appreciated.

-- John