Lenovo Energy Management software effecting Linux?

[steveplatz]

I have a Lenovo U260 that is only a month old. The first OS I used on it after immediately wiping Windows was 32bit Ubuntu 10.10, mostly because that was what I had been using for some time on my last machine. Eventually I decided to re-install Ubuntu, this time with 64bit 11.10. After doing this, I noticed that the battery was not charging all the way to 100%, only to about 80%. For other reasons (mostly because I missed Gnome) I am now using 64bit Linux Mint "Lisa", which I like very much, by the way. However, I have noticed that the issue with the battery only charging to 80% is the same. I have done a little searching here and in other forums and have not discovered this issue mentioned anywhere else, probably because there aren't too many people reporting on using this particular laptop with linux. In any case, I thought I would put this out there to see if there are any others who may know about this issue, or who may have ideas about its cause.

[remoulder]

not discovered this issue mentioned anywhere else

Searching on your laptop model may not bring up many hits, you need to search for battery and power generally. There are some severe regressions wrt batteries and laptop power in ubuntu 11.10/mint 12, see https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?fiel ... ic+battery for a few reports. Updating to a newer kernel 'may' fix the issue.

[steveplatz]

Updating to a newer kernel 'may' fix the issue.

What are the disadvantages to updating to a newer kernel, if any?

[remoulder]

What are the disadvantage

In general none, by default the old kernel is retained so you can always revert back if the new one causes problems.

[steveplatz]

I just stumbled across a bug report that gave some information of possible use here. I have heard about a battery care function that will apparently limit the maximum battery charge. When I look at /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info I see the following

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present:                 yes
design capacity:         39960 mWh
last full capacity:      36970 mWh
battery technology:      rechargeable
design voltage:          11100 mV
design capacity warning: 420 mWh
design capacity low:     156 mWh
cycle count:              0
capacity granularity 1:  264 mWh
capacity granularity 2:  3780 mWh
model number:            PABAS024
serial number:           3658Q
battery type:            LION
OEM info:                SIMPLO

Comparing this to /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state

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present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          charged
present rate:            0 mW
remaining capacity:      29570 mWh
present voltage:         15939 mV

I can see that the (charged) state 29570 mWh is 80% of the last full capacity reported above 36970 mWh. The user that reported the bug later recommends booting into Windows and disabling Battery care as a workaround, which is not a possibility for me on my single-boot machine. My laptop did ship with Windows, however, so I suspect there is some information left over from when it was used that is now being reported to linux. My goal now is to discover where this information is stored and how to change it.

[ddaann]

Are you sure that using Ubuntu/Linux Mint with power regression issues has not already damaged your battery, reducing its capacity down to 80%? Such damage is one of the issues caused. When experiencing the power regression issue on my x121e I read somewhere about a user experiencing 50% drop in capacity when using a cheap replacement battery. But...your power management setting sounds more plausible...

In relation to the newer kernel, this power regression issue is not going to be fixed until kernel 3.3 which will be out in a few months (it is already in testing it seems from the ubuntu kernel server)

[steveplatz]

Are you sure that using Ubuntu/Linux Mint with power regression issues has not already damaged your battery, reducing its capacity down to 80%? Such damage is one of the issues caused.

That is also plausible, of course. I guess I didn't want to assume that power regression issues could damage a two-month-old battery, but I don't have any reason that that's not the case, either.

[dsiarchith]

Hi

Fellow Lenovo user here (Lenovo G570).

It sounds like the energy management software locked your battery charging. The only thing to do is to re-install windows and the energy management software (hope you did a backup of the Software partition your laptop probably came with) and uncheck the energy management feature.

It's strange though, mint 12 and ubuntu 11.04 detected the battery as "Sony" models. I enabled the "force apsm=true" option in grub, and in mint 12, i have around 5 hours from 100% charge.

strangely though, ubuntu 11.04 used to show it at 7 hours remaining!!! Don't know how accurate that was.

What kind of battery life are you getting from your laptop?

[steveplatz]

It sounds like the energy management software locked your battery charging. The only thing to do is to re-install windows and the energy management software (hope you did a backup of the Software partition your laptop probably came with) and uncheck the energy management feature.

I very unfortunately did not make a back-up of the software partition that my laptop cam with. However, I have some new evidence that may mean that that energy management is not the issue. I now have a maximum charge level not of 80%, but of 76%. I am now leaning more toward a power regression issue and wondering if I should be using Linux kernal version 3.2.

[ddaann]

The power regression issue is perhaps damaging your battery, reducing the capacity as was suggested. The 3.2 kernel would do the same as the power regression issue is not fixed until kernel 3.3 apparently. I had similar problems and switched back to Mint 11 to wait it out.

[steveplatz]

I had similar problems and switched back to Mint 11 to wait it out.

Has that increased your battery performance? I will certainly install an older kernal if that is my best option.

[ddaann]

Yup, sure did. My battery performance on my lenovo x121e with Mint 12 was appalling. It almost halved it. With Mint 11 I have full performance, running just as it did with windows, if not for longer. Temperatures are a lot lower, on average 10-15c less. A lot of the kernels around have the same power regression issue. I think (I might be wrong) it emerges at 2.6.39...

[steveplatz]

Some have reported that 3.2 does a better job with power management. I'm downloading the daily of Ubuntu 12.04 with that kernal now to do some experiments with a live session on a USB stick. If I can't notice improvement, I will certainly revert to an older OS.

[ej64]

If it's a sandy bridge with hd graphics it's dead shure you are affected by the 2 power regressions that were introduced by changing the allowed CPU/GPU/chipset power states due to bug reports. These changes came with kernel 2.6.38 and 3.0.

It's easy to revert these changes and to carry out a test. But I'm somewhat tired now repeating this over and over like a mantra ... (just search my postings) I even told ddaann how to cure it but he didn't hear. Just yesterday I guided a mate over in the german section and he was very happy about the solution. This again was a small motivation ... so here we go:

At the grub menu press <e> and navigate to the line with splash (or nosplash) and insert pcie_aspm=force and i915.i915_enable_rc6=1
Then boot with <F10>

If it works as expected and no system instablity occurs (there's only a small risk) then make these changes permanent:
gksu gedit /etc/default/grub
find the line with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" and insert the above mentioned parameters. save and exit
sudo update-grub

I run my Thinkpad X220 since some time like this and it needs only 5 W when idling, giving me 5 to 8 hours on battery.

[ddaann]

Nice One ej64. I couldn't get my head round the edits when you first mentioned them to me. I wasn't confident enough to try them. Now, having edited grub for my resolution (no success though) I'm more confident. But will remain with Mint 11 until the kernel is out probably.

On another note ej64, would you have any advice for my ongoing screen resolution problem that I have posted variously around the forum and web? Sorry for hijacking this post for my own ends but the suggestions I have been given have not worked and I've ended up in a bit of an impasse.

daniel@daniel-ThinkPad-X121e ~ $ inxi -Gx
Graphics: Card Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller X.Org 1.10.1 Res: 1280x800@58.1hz
GLX Renderer Mesa DRI Intel Sandybridge Mobile GEM 20100330 DEVELOPMENT x86/MMX/SSE2 GLX Version 2.1 Mesa 7.10.2 Direct Rendering Yes

It should be 1366x768, but that option has disappeared, xrandr does not work, and editing vga=844 in grub makes no difference.

Any suggestions?

[steveplatz]

If it's a sandy bridge with hd graphics it's dead shure you are affected by the 2 power regressions that were introduced by changing the allowed CPU/GPU/chipset power states due to bug reports.

My processor is a 1.33GHz Intel Core i5 U470, which is Nehalem. Would you still recommend the changes to GRUB?

[ej64]

My processor is a 1.33GHz Intel Core i5 U470, which is Nehalem. Would you still recommend the changes to GRUB?

You mean a i5-470UM, it's an Arrandale. Yes, you should definitely try it. There are more platforms affected. If the changes you make while booting don't work or even your system crashes, there's nothing to worry since these changes are non-permanent (only editing /etc/default/grub is permanent).

[ej64]

It should be 1366x768, but that option has disappeared, xrandr does not work, and editing vga=844 in grub makes no difference.

Well, perhaps I've been lucky. Initially I had a similar issue and vga=844 worked miraculously, though I think in the meantime this parameter only sets the framebuffer size for the text console. Somewhat later I observed I didn't need the parameter any more. Perhaps this had to do with a newer kernel (I'm using 3.1.8 atm) but I never went into detail...

I would try to create xorg.conf with a modeline like this (from my system):

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"Modeline 1366x768"x0.0   74.80  1366 1414 1446 1578  768 770 775 790 -hsync -vsync (47.4 kHz)

When you boot into recovery mode you may run sudo Xorg --configure what probes input/output devices and writes a pretty basic xorg.conf to /root. Edit it with such a modeline and copy it to /etc/X11
But don't ask for details last time I edited an xorg.conf has been in another millenium. Perhaps sb. else can take over?

[ddaann]

You are a star. I'll get onto this tomorrow evening. Thanks so much.

[steveplatz]

If the changes you make while booting don't work or even your system crashes, there's nothing to worry since these changes are non-permanent (only editing /etc/default/grub is permanent).

Thanks for your advice, ej64. I haven't yet noticed any improvement after making changes to grub - is there something I can do to track the results?