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Battery and Thinkapad r52

Started by holgos2, 2012.03.17, 12:43:05

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holgos2

Hi there, I bought a new accu  (battery?) for my thinkpad r52.
I once again became aware of a problem concerning powermanagement and ecs (Version 2)
Running Ecs system with fully charged battery the powermanagement shows a remaining time of 100 minutes usage left. This is shown when running in idle state, display ist set to the lowest value, no programms running.
Changing to WinXp on the same machine, and running under similar conditions, I have apr. 3h30min time of usage left. Are there any known issues with Ecs and the R52 which could explain this difference. I use apm, which probably is old compared to powermanagement with winxp, but for example suspend resume works very good on this machine, so I rather suspect a problem with apm and the battery


DougB

I am not sure if the thinkpad r52 can do ACPI or not. If it can, you should use the ACPI stuff from eCS Software Subscription, if possible. The old APM really does not do any power saving, so everything runs at full power, and that will drain the battery faster than you might expect. It should not hurt the battery, as long as you don't let it get to less than 25% most of the time. Going lower, every once in a while, doesn't hurt either, but doing it all of the time will shorten the battery life.

Since it is a new battery, you should drain, and recharge, it a couple of times, before you trust the numbers. It is possible that there is still some residual battery data left from your old battery.

Blonde Guy

That difference sounds about right. eCS lacks several power saving features that Win 2000 (or XP) has.

While the latest ACPI doesn't help much (actually it might make it worse), I think power saving features are in the pipeline for release for ACPI. There is already power management, which allows you to slow the CPU to save power, but that's not very satisfactory.

Once the CPU can halt while it is idle (a feature to be added soon), you should see battery life nearly as long as WinXP.

There are some other threads on OS/2 world about the HLT issue.
Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

holgos2

Hi there and thank you for your answers,

-I am not sure if the thinkpad r52 can do ACPI or not. If it can, you should use the ACPI stuff from eCS Software-

I tried ACPI but never really was satisfied. In some ways the last version worked, at least I was able to reduce the CPU Speed, but the performance was kind of notchy, so I quit trying.
Strange enough, I remember I had posted the issue some time ago in a german forum, and someone stated to remember 2.5 to 3 hours of usage running on battery. Are there any differences between OS/2 and Ecs concerning APM?


Greetings

Holger

DougB

QuoteWhile the latest ACPI doesn't help much (actually it might make it worse),

Not in my experience. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T510, an IBM ThinkPad T43, and an Asus M3A78-EM motherboard, with quad core Phenom processor (desktop). All of them run much cooler (and therefore more efficiently) with ACPI 3.19.15. Versions earlier than 3.19.11 (actually 3.19.13) don't do power reduction without some sort of outside program, and you do need to enable throttling with ACPI 3.19.15, or it doesn't do it either. The installer puts the wrong path in the ACPI Power Manager icon, it is actually in the eCS\BIN directory. Run that, and you can enable the throttling, as well as change other things (probably not recommended unless you understand what you are doing).

I also have an older IBM ThinkPad A22e, that does not do ACPI, so I use APM with it. The (new) battery is good for about 2 hours, while the 15 month old T510 (using ACPI 3.19.15), is good for about the same time. Windows 7, claims that it will do about 3.5 hours, but that is only true if you don't actually use it. The battery goes down a lot faster when you do use it. Windows also powers off more stuff than eCS can (the CD/DVD drive goes off until you press the open button, twice). I suspect that there are some other things that eCS doesn't even know about, like the media card reader, and the Express card slot, that do not  get powered off. It also will not power off the screen.

Yes, the battery does get used up faster in eCS, but the actual difference to what windows will do is not as much as you might expect. The new ACPI power saving is much more effective on multi-processor systems because part of what it does, is turn off all but one CPU when the processing power isn't needed, then it turns them back on when it is. My T43 (single processor, running in an SMP setup) can be made to save more power if I use the old SETGETSTATE.EXE program to slow it down. It appears that the new ACPI does not use that method.

QuoteAre there any differences between OS/2 and Ecs concerning APM?

No. APM hasn't changed for many years. It also doesn't do as much for power saving as the latest ACPI does. The main advantage of APM, on my A22e, is that hibernation will work with it. I can't get suspend/resume (never mind hibernation) to work with my T510. Actually I think it does work, but it won't turn the screen back on, so it is difficult to tell. The suspend/resume, and hibernation, is done by the BIOS in the A22e, all it needs is drivers that can do what they are told.

abwillis

Doug, if you are running the T43 with SMP then the idlehlt driver may help it.  From what I understand, the Uni kernel already does HLT but not the SMP one, so even if using APM the idlehlt may benefit it.  Steven was looking at the idlehlt driver to see if it would help them with adding the HLT to the ACPI but as simplistic as my driver was I don't know if it really helped them any or not.

DougB

QuoteDoug, if you are running the T43 with SMP then the idlehlt driver may help it.

I tried the IdleHLT driver before the new ACPI came out. It didn't seem to work very well  8)

If the new ACPI is actually using IdleHLT, it is not obvious, and there should be a way to turn that off, if they are using it. I seem to recall that the main problem with the IdleHLT driver was that the system would just lock up randomly, and it took a forced power off (or reset button) to break it free. I am seeing the odd hang that is very similar, that started after I installed ACPI 3.19.15 on my desktop system (I don't use the T43 very much any more).

I use the SMP support on the T43 for two reasons: 1) It runs better when I can use APIC support (everything isn't on IRQ 11). 2) I can use the new ACPI power control support, which is not as effective on a single processor as it is on a multi processor. The T43 also identifies the only processor as CPU 1, while most systems start at CPU 0. The most effective power control on the T43 is the old SETGETSTATE.EXE program, which slows the clock. It appears that the new ACPI only does throttling (SETGETTHRTL.EXE), and stopping all but CPU 0, when the processing power is not needed. The T43, of course, does not have extra processors to shut down, which is why the new ACPI is not as effective on it.

FWIW, I never saw any evidence that the UNI kernel ran the machine any cooler (and thus more efficiently) than it runs with the SMP kernel, until you add the ACPI power controls to the SMP kernel.

abwillis

The current ACPI is not yet using the HLT command (idlehlt is just the name I chose for the driver which just calls the HLT command).  I believe the idea is not for them to use idlehlt itself but rather just adding HLT to ACPI.

holgos2

Hi there once again,
I kind of played around a little bit with my R52. The main think I did was to switch back from the smp kernel to the
14.105 Kernel. This really was an improvement concerning power consumption. Running on 100% charged battery, display set to the lowest value, no programs running I now have a remaining time of usage somewhere between 2h30 and 3 hours, which is a great improvement. My battery widget is reacting more sensitive too, showing alternating values much faster, depending on activities, lke starting firefox or papyrus f.e. I think I will do a new, clean install with the uni-kernel.
On further question: I included the following statement in my config.sys -SET SHOWEXTENDEDPOWERMENU=YES
Now I get an extra graph in my power-object which increases or decreases if I run the R52 on AC or DC, Further on there is a line included stating -throttling disabled-. Which throttling ?????. The conclusion is that there is some kind of throttling supposed to be.

Holger






holgos2

Hi there once again.
As mentioned before I experimented a little bit with apm on my thinkpad r52. There definitely is a great difference
when a. not using the smp kernel and b. when using the latest speedstep files for ecs /os2. First off all this combination seems to increase the time left when running on battery. I now have appr. 2h 45 min to 3 h when running on battery charged and the system idle and setting the display brightness to the lowest value. But there is on more thing I found out by chance which really amazed me: I use the genmac driver to be able to use wlan with the r52. Running ecs with the smp kernel on battery I had to set the bios speed step value for running on battery to -automatic- to make sure that the genmac driver worked correct when loading. Still on some boots I had the problem that the device was not found. Now I can even set the battery values to the lowest level like battery optimized or minimum battery and the wlan device loads any time I boot.

Greetings