[ltp] ACPI S3 power drain and Thinkpad Wiki/radeonfb

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

Clark, Tino and Michael thanks for your responses.  Sounds like I
have three different options to try!  But none of you mentioned those
messages I get at modprobe time.  Does anyone know if they are a
serious problem?  Or are they because radeonfb can't be loaded
because vesafb's already kicked in?

Anyway, to your responses:

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Clark Williams wrote:

> I think that loading radeonfb from rc.local is a bit too late. Try
> doing what I did, which is add a script that loads the framebuffer
> early in the run-level.

Hmm, but isn't rc.local run before X kicks in?  It's
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S99local after all, and inittab determines when the
rc scripts and X get started by init.  And surely going to runlevel 3,
removing and reinserting the module would ensure it was early enough?
Thanks for the script anyway, I'll look - but I'm still concerned
about those errors.  Do they not show there's a problem at module
insertion time?

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Tino Keitel wrote:

> AFAIK the power drain has nothing to do with the backlight, but with
> some power saving state of the radeon chip which was not entered.

Agreed Tino - I think it's a misnomer, probably as the patch evolved.
The Wiki page seems to confirm this is the right one and it's
included in the FC4 kernel.  I can't see any others that reference
radeonfb, and it contains the whitelist by machine model number I'd
expect.

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Michael Keyl wrote:

>> apart from requesting a higher resolution
>> with "vga=0x317".
>
> I guess that is the culprit. If you choose at bootup anything else than
> standard resolution (25x80 text mode!) a framebuffer driver must be used and
> this is ususally vesafb. Hence your options are to build your own kernel and
> compile radeonfb rather than vesafb into the kernel (thats what I have done,
> but I am not using fedora -- I have to build my own kernel anyway), or boot
> your system with standard resolution.

Ah - I didn't know that - thanks.  But I need a higher resolution
for a pretty swsusp2 fbsplash screen! :)  And it's so useful for
console usage - hmm.  Can I boot with a kernel parameter to use the
radeon framebuffer even if it's a module?  Or compile it into initrd?