[ltp] Re: Hoary Thinkpad T40 hang on APM battery?

[Justin Mason]

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(cc'ing the linux-thinkpad list, too; LTP people, the background is:
Thinkpad T40 running Ubuntu Hoary crashes when running from battery, after
a period of time ranging roughly from 5 minutes to 50 mins.  No crashes on
AC, this is purely battery-related.  madwifi drivers are loaded.)

Justin Mason writes:
> Nathan R. Valentine writes:
> > FWIW, I've disabled both ACPI and APM via /boot/grub/menu.list's
> > "apci=off apm=off" and been running from battery as a test. I've had no
> > crashes since making that change. That doesn't help much (still need
> > power management!) but it does point to the stability issues being in
> > power management support for the T40 rather than in some other
> > sub-system.
> 
> Hi Nathan --
> 
> good, I'm not the only one! ;)
> 
> I'm now trying the Hoary kernel package version of the kernel, instead
> of my own build of the vanilla 2.6.10 or 2.6.6.  So far, no crashes,
> running from battery on 3 occasions for about 50 minutes avg each.
> I'll keep the list updated, if I do get another crash.
> 
> BTW, the magic SysRq key doesn't work post-crash, as far as I can see --
> it works as expected before the crash, but does nothing once the crash has
> occurred.  So the bug does seem likely to be Thinkpad BIOS- or
> kernel-related.

Update, as promised.  ok, got another one; this time, I left it on a text
console rather than X, and it still crashed -- so that rules out one
possibility, which was that it was X-related.  BTW, I also switched to
XFree86 4.3.0.1 instead of the X.org server, in case that might have had
something to do with it.  It seems it didn't.

The magic SysRq key also was still non-functional, ruling out another
possibility, which was that the SysRq failures before were also X-related.

Again, there were no messages in the log, and a power cycle (ie. holding
down the power button for 5 secs) was required to reset the machine.

So it's now happened on: kernel 2.6.6, kernel 2.6.10, and Ubuntu's 2.6.10
kernel package.  It still seems non-kernel-related, since that's a wide
range of kernels.   It also seems non-X-related, given the data above.

Worth noting that if it's a BIOS issue, I haven't upgraded the BIOS since
last year, and had used it successfully for months with Debian unstable
without difficulty.  So it'd have to be something in Ubuntu tickling an
existing BIOS bug, that Debian doesn't tickle.

I'd welcome any tips on further ways to diagnose the problem... tips on
how to get some verbose logging from the kernel would be excellent, as I
could at least get that output to the console and see what the last
message was, once it crashes.

- --j.
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