Several things got broken during a major update

[arhenius]

Dear All

After a major update to my laptop's gentoo system (last update was in September'10). I had to make several emerge -uvDN world, pearl-cleaner and python-updater. I also did the transition to openRC and baselaytou-2 without trouble and compiled a new kernel (2.6.39-r3). For the most part, everything is working fine in this ASUS UL30VT, including the nvidia card (I'm not trying to switch between videocards because I'm quite interested in learning some CUDA).

However, some things got broken and I would like to be able to address some issues:

• /proc/acpi is almost empty
  

  Code:

  ls /proc/acpi/ ac_adapter  battery  button  event  wakeup

  
  This makes twisting things like cpu throttling and seting LCD brightness a lot more complicated, since I have to use the labirintic /sys directory. Is there any way to get the old /proc/acpi system back? Or a way to understand the /sys directory?
  
  
• $battery_time in conky does not showq the expected autonomy. Instead, it only say 'unknown'. What happened to these very useful feature? I suppose it may have something to do with the migration of the acpi interface from /proc to /sys, but the /proc/acpi/battery folder and files are still present.
  
  
• OpenRC tries to start net.eth0 on every boot. Since most of the time my laptop is not connected, this greatly increases boot time. I'm using wicd for managing this, and in the old init net.eth0 was deleted from the default level after installing wicd.
  

  Code:

  # rc-update del net.eth0  * rc-update: service `net.eth0' is not in the runlevel `default'  # rc-status Runlevel: default  metalog                                                           [  started  ]  sshd                                                              [  started  ]  netmount                                                          [  started  ]  xdm                                                               [  started  ]  acpid                                                             [  started  ]  bluetooth                                                         [  started  ]  cupsd                                                             [  started  ]  fcron                                                             [  started  ]  lighttpd                                                          [  started  ]  pure-ftpd                                                         [  started  ]  udev-postmount                                                    [  started  ]  local                                                             [  started  ] Dynamic Runlevel: hotplugged  bluetooth                                                         [  started  ]  net.eth0                                                          [  stopped  ] Dynamic Runlevel: needed  sysfs                                                             [  started  ]  xdm-setup                                                         [  started  ]  dbus                                                              [  started  ] Dynamic Runlevel: manual

  
  
  
• cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave brings CPU freq to 800MHz but does not alter battery life I thought lowering the cpu frequency would bring some benefits in terms of battery life, but it has no effect on it (even when using this together with the powersave governor).
  
  
• (Just a curiosity) I thought Fn+F9 would stop the touchpad, but it has no effect. As anyone figured out how to temporally disable the touchpad?
  

Thanks in advance for your help.
_________________
Filipe

[DirtyHairy]

[arhenius]

Hi DirtyHairy, Thanks for the reply.

[smartass]

Hi Filipe,

here are a few thoughts, they may or may not be helpful in your situation:

1) cpufreq scaling is not the only way to increase the battery life, I've heard of cpus for which power consumption does not vary that much with freq scaling
I believe using something like laptop-mode-tools or/with pm-powersave and maybe hdparm can be also rewarding

2)I'd be interested in the output of

Code:

lsmod|grep freq


even if you have loaded acpi_cpufreq, just make sure that it's not a module from the older kernel if you used to load it automatically before

3)ever heard of the the ASPM bug?
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_2638_aspm&num=3

if the output of

Code:

cat /sys/module/pcie_aspm/parameters/policy

is something like


Code:

[default] performance powersave


you should not be affected

[s4e8]

for the net.eth0 delay, the easiest way is "emerge ifplugd".

[VoidMage]