Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Linux ACPI problem on HP nx series laptops

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Sun, Apr 8, 2007 at 20:03 IST (last updated: Wed, Oct 29, 2008 @ 22:28 IST)

Till recently I had a hell of a time trying to find out why my laptop no longer had the ACPI functions enabled after upgrading to kernel 2.6.18 (Debian Etch). The thing is, ACPI is very important on a laptop - without it, I get no battery status, no poweroff, no hibernate, suspend and no thermal or fan monitoring.

There was a related problem with acpid mentioned on the Debian bug report archives which confused me for a while, but that bug had been addressed by the Debian developers. However, I managed to pinpoint the exact problem only today (after weeks and weeks of frustration). Why am I saying all this? Because I found out the power of the great command, dmesg. Yes, thanks to this, I found this error message (check the highlighted part): 
#dmesg | grep ACPI
BIOS-e820: 000000000f7efc00 - 000000000f7fb000 (ACPI NVS)
ACPI: RSDP (v000 HP                                    ) @ 0x000fe270
ACPI: RSDT (v001 HP     099C     0x16090520 HP   0x00000001) @ 0x0f7efc84
ACPI: FADT (v002 HP     099C     0x00000002 HP   0x00000001) @ 0x0f7efc00
ACPI: MADT (v001 HP     099C     0x00000001 HP   0x00000001) @ 0x0f7efcb4
ACPI: MCFG (v001 HP     099C     0x00000001 HP   0x00000001) @ 0x0f7efd10
ACPI: DSDT (v001 HP       DAU00  0x00010000 MSFT 0x0100000e) @ 0x00000000
ACPI: Vendor "HP    " System "  DAU00 " Revision 0x10000 has a known ACPI BIOS problem.
ACPI: Reason: Bogus fan support. This is a non-recoverable error
ACPI: Disabling ACPI support
ACPI: Interpreter disabled.
pnp: PnP ACPI: disabled
PCI quirk: region 1000-107f claimed by ICH6 ACPI/GPIO/TCO
This led me to this to this bug report which describes the problem for HP nx based laptops.

The only fix seems to be to compile a newer kernel and unfortunately that's a bit tricky since pristine kernels from kernel.org don't play too well with Debian and tend to break a few things like iptables.

I'm posting this message in the hope that other owners of HP laptops with the same problem on Linux are aware of the real issue (and can get on to this post through web search). Trust me, it sounds easy now, but I had great difficulty in pinning down this problem right down to the kernel.

For those who want to follow the issue, please check this thread I've created in forums.debian.net.

1 comment(s)

  1. [...] 37prime wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIssue which breaks ACPI on HP laptops in Linux kernel 2.6.18. [...]

    Comment by hewlet packard » Linux ACPI problem on HP nx series laptops (visitor) on Mon, Apr 9, 2007 @ 01:45 IST #

Comments closed

The blog owner has closed further commenting on this entry.