OS2 World Community Forum

OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Utilities => Topic started by: Holger Schuett on June 04, 2017, 10:30:16 am

Title: Battery charge
Post by: Holger Schuett on June 04, 2017, 10:30:16 am
Hi there,
has there ever been a tool for os2/ecs/Arcaos with which one could control the charging of a laptop battery?
I would like to have a possibility to change the start and end level for battery charging, for example start charging when less than 35% battery left and stop at 85%.

Cheers
Holger
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Eugene Gorbunoff on June 04, 2017, 10:47:37 am
No, we don't have such tools.

Battery Widget shows the level of battery.
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Roderick Klein on June 05, 2017, 01:16:15 pm
Hi there,
has there ever been a tool for os2/ecs/Arcaos with which one could control the charging of a laptop battery?
I would like to have a possibility to change the start and end level for battery charging, for example start charging when less than 35% battery left and stop at 85%.

Cheers
Holger

I also seem to remember that the charging in electronics in a laptop do not allow you to control the charging of a battery in that way. In other words the software can not control this.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Holger Schuett on June 05, 2017, 06:00:05 pm
Quote
I also seem to remember that the charging in electronics in a laptop do not allow you to control the charging of a battery in that way. In other words the software can not control this.

Hi Roderick,
I do not quite understand your reply. In Windows or Linux you can set the levels for charging the battery. Right now I do the following : I have a usb device with a linux mint installed. Using the TLP-Package one can set the start and stop point for the battery charging. This seems to get stored (in the bios?).When rebooting to Arcaos on the same machine the setiings remain as set. That made me wonder if there is something equivelant for os2/ecs/arcaos?

Holger

Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Martin Iturbide on June 05, 2017, 06:06:08 pm
Hi Holger

That is an interesting feature request. It is called "Battery Charge Threshold" in some other platforms.  The idea is to help you preserve the health of the battery by making it discharge and charge according to selected limits.

For example here it is the one that cames on "Lenovo Settings" for Thinkpads. (see attachment).

Regards
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Holger Schuett on June 05, 2017, 06:26:05 pm
Hi Martin,
yes that is what I meant. I know this feature from Windows myself and as mentioned from Linux Mint.
As the setting do not change when booting ArcaOs I was just wondering if there would be a possibility to have something similar for os2/arcaOs.

Cheers
Holger
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: xynixme on June 06, 2017, 07:42:34 am
I was just wondering if there would be a possibility to have something similar for os2/arcaOs.

ACPI is a requirement ("Makes ACPI calls using the acpi_call kernel module, which is REQUIRED"). So is modern hardware. ArcaOS: maybe.
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Andi B. on June 06, 2017, 08:16:17 am
Quote
As the setting do not change when booting ArcaOs I was just wondering if there would be a possibility to have something similar for os2/arcaOs.
Most probably the answer is - no. Never heard of such utility. We still have problems even reading basic system health information (temperature, fan speed, ...) so I think there is very little chance someone did such sophisticated things for current Notebooks. Last time we had similar support on OS/2 (changing bios settings from the OS) was in the Thinkpad 365X/760 days IIRC.
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on June 07, 2017, 05:10:00 am
If you have the source code for a battery program, you can modify it to use ACPI under OS/2. The developer's toolkit for ACPI is available here:

https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/acpi/ (https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/acpi/)
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: roberto on June 07, 2017, 08:24:35 am
We still have problems even reading basic system health information (temperature, fan speed, ...) so I think there is very little chance someone did such sophisticated things for current Notebooks.
I understand that if you are contemplating analyzing pc temperatures, it is because of the problem that some lucky like me, we have a laptop that goes off alone.
I in my case have come to the conclusion, that this problem is not because of the temperature.
With the ecs22b2 had to wait after turning off 20 minutes, and with arcaos only 10 minutes. Before turning it on again. It is an improvement but not enough.
The fact is that if I leave those 10 minutes off, before restarting it I can have it on without problems indefinitely.
But if I click on RestartDesktop ..., in 90% of cases, before 5 minutes the laptop goes off.
The question is why?
saludos
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Dave Yeo on June 07, 2017, 08:52:54 am
I have a laptop that I got for $5 since it wouldn't run for more then maybe 5 minutes. Took it apart and the fan was stuffed with dust. Cleaned it and it runs fine.
Way back, I went through a period of fan failure in my desktop. OS/2 would get unstable, I'd replace the CPU fan and everything would be good.
Possibly, the ArcaOS ACPI is set to handle a higher temperature and that's why your system stays up longer. Take it apart and blow it out. Always a good idea with older machines.
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Andi B. on June 07, 2017, 08:55:58 am
@Roberto - I can not follow what you're talking about. Guess it has nothing to do with the topic 'Battery charge', does it?
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Holger Schuett on June 07, 2017, 10:23:04 am
Quote
Last time we had similar support on OS/2 (changing bios settings from the OS) was in the Thinkpad 365X/760 days IIRC.
Hi Andi,
as far as I remember: I had a Thinkpad R52 on which I installed ECS using APM and using speed step.
I do recall that using the power object->properties->performance would change the settings in the Bios
/power/speedstep enabled etc.
But ok, this was APM??
Quote
If you have the source code for a battery program, you can modify it to use ACPI under OS/2. The developer's toolkit for ACPI is available here:
Hi Neil, I wish I had the abilities to do this.
All I know are these packages/drivers for example used for linux systems on thinkpads:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Tp_smapi#Installation_on_Debian_and_Ubuntu

Regards
Holger
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: xynixme on June 07, 2017, 12:16:00 pm
The question is why?

If possible, try software which controls the fan to manage or understand the problem:

(http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~schmitzr/tpfcpics/v06201.jpg)

A cleaned fan may be capable of keeping it cool, but perhaps it has to spin up earlier because the fan is not working perfectly anymore. The goal of such an app is to minimize fan activities, but you can also use it to analyze temperatures and customize/maximize fan activities. For example, the screenshot (Windows & older ThinkPads?) above shows temperatures, RPM of the fan and customizable (temperature ranges, fan speed) settings instead of just the default settings. If this learns you that a cleaned fan is too bad to work properly, then a repaired fan will work for OS/2 too (I've never used OS/2's controlyourfans due to its hardware requirements).
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: roberto on June 07, 2017, 06:25:29 pm
Andi- It's not about battery charge

André- At this moment I have no possibility to try this software, although I have tried it in vbox, xp-guest, but it does not work as expected.
But when I was with ecs22b2, I had a partition of w10, which did not give me that problem when I was booting.
What I say is that there is something in the system boot which is the same as there is in the Restar Desktop .. and causes the same damage.
I discard the shutdown (since I have tried the 3 types of shutdown without differences), and discard the temperatures, for two reasons w10 starts and work, and if I do the rest of 10 minutes, it can be on without problems more than 24 hours in a row.
saludos
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: xynixme on June 09, 2017, 12:13:49 pm
w10 starts and work, and if I do the rest of 10 minutes, it can be on without problems more than 24 hours in a row.

W10 may have more aggressive fan settings than the default settings, but that's too off-topic and may be a wrong conclusion.

Aggressive means starting the fan at lower temperatures, and optionally with more RPM compared to the default setting. With e.g. XP and a BIOS-based IBM ThinkPad you'd use a more aggressive setting if the hardware gets too hot, while considering ordering a new fan. The official goal of software like controlyourfans, which requires specific hardware, is a less aggressive setting.

The problem may not be related to temperatures at all, but monitoring or logging temperatures isn't that hard. So it's quite easy to exclude temperatures/fans or to determine that heat is the most likely cause. W10 doesn't exclude temperatures, if (I don't know) it uses different temperature/fan settings.

Do be aware of problems which have nothing to do with temperatures, occurring after a while when the hardware isn't cold anymore. Your fan and fan settings may be fine.
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: roberto on June 10, 2017, 05:14:57 pm
Well it seems that the xcenter has become my ally, it turns out that thanks to him I can predict when it was going to turn off the laptop.
Specifically, the program pulse
When it shows me a red line, I have a 3 minutes to turn off the system, or it turns itself off, no hang, not trap, no error.
Another thing that happens is that when I press Restart desktop ..., of the 8 processors, it shows me
 12% 2% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% and begin the red line...tictac...3minutes off.

In the readme of the program pulse, about the red line:
By contrast, the "IRQ" load represents the time that was needed to process interrupts. As you might know, interrupts are a way for hardware
components to signal to the CPU that some important event occurred which needs to be serviced immediately.
Most commonly, interrupts are raised by hard disks, sound cards, network adapters, and serial and printer communications.
These devices cannot afford to wait until the ArcaOS scheduler has finished a process timeslice and is ready to switch to another task.
Instead, when an IRQ comes in, the ArcaOS kernel interrupts the regular scheduling sequence and calls an interrupt handler instead,
which, in most cases, will be code in some device driver. (In general, only ArcaOS device drivers can install interrupt handlers.)
For example, if an interrupt from the hard disk comes in, code in IBM1S506.ADD will be called immediately to service the interrupt.   

If you never see any IRQ load on your system, this is normal. This is probably the case if you do not have any network adapters
installed and you have busmastering enabled for your hard disks. However, if you have a high IRQ load, you might consider taking
measurements to reduce it -- enable busmastering for your hard disks and/or get a network adapter which is capable of busmastering.   
====end help file ============
Today I installed the samba server, to prove it. And the system starts, it does not show me the xcenter,
I call it and I see the red line in pulse, a little later it goes out. Do not configure anything on samba server.
Comment that I had the samba client running.
I've tried it several times, it all goes off. Restore the previous system.

Could someone tell me, how can I make my disks do busmastering, and my network card?
Nor do I understand that it is busmastering, because of a translation problem.
saludos
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: Dave Yeo on June 10, 2017, 05:51:58 pm
Have you tried running with less cores activated? Someone (Dariusz?) can only use 7 of 8 cores.
Title: Re: Battery charge
Post by: roberto on June 10, 2017, 10:17:20 pm
Have you tried running with less cores activated? Someone (Dariusz?) can only use 7 of 8 cores.
Thanks Dave,
It seems that you have found the solution. I put maximum number of processors 7, and it seems that the problem is solved. I have not tried it yet but the first tests have been very good.
I send a photo because even though it is 7, it seems that one repeats the number zero twice.
saludos