Arch Linux

tillux

Member

Registered: 2012-03-04

Posts: 7

HP Pavilion dm4 2100sg

Hi there. I've just recently bought the HP Pavilion dm4 2100sg and decided to install arch - I've been using arch for the last couple of years for my desktop so I haven't had to cope with powersaving issues etc.
I'd like to share what I've had to customize but also (and especially) list issues I couldn't resolve yet (I'll move this to the wiki but there are still some unresolved issues which I need help with )

First of all the dm4 has got a hybrid graphicscard setup (with an integrated intel card and a dedicated radeon card). To be able to toggle the radeon card off or on, I installed hybrid-video-ati-intel from the AUR (for more information see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hy … e_Graphics - the fstab line comes in rather handy if you want to switch the card off/on yourself). You'll probably want to have it switched off by default, especially when on battery.

Now, there are a lot of things which do work out of the box but sometimes rather poorly.
The fn keys for increasing and decreasing brightness work, but they seem to have a stepsize of about 30 (on a scale of 100), which is rather annoying. I still haven't figured out who/what is actually responsible for them, and I seem unable to remap them to smaller "steps". The temporary solution to this is to map

xbacklight -10

and

xbacklight +10

resp. to some other keys (e.g. AudioLowerVolume and AudioRaiseVolume *g*).
By the way: the backlight is toggled off during boot which seems to be a common issue with laptops (lost the links).

powertop2 also reports 100% Usage and a rather high power estimate for the snd-hda-codec-idt driver. This seems to be a known issue (see [put links here]) but I'm still not sure if powertop2 is just misreporting. For the time being, reloading (e.g. rmmod and modprobe) the modules

snd-hda-codec-hdmi snd-hda-codec-idt snd-hda-codec snd-hda-intel

seems to work.

Another open issue is the ALPS touchpad which only shows up as a PS/2 device. Installing psmouse-alps or psmouse-elantech didn't help (see issue on linux-archive.org, issue on archlinux.org). This might get resolved with linux 3.3...

WLAN works out of the box but here's a rather interesting thing: powertop2 reports about 5W for eth0 which I rather doubt is true, as nothing has ignited yet Interesting enough, upon disabling the interface with

ifconfig eth0 down

the discharge rate reported actually does drop (but of course not by 5W).

I also added

acpi=noirq pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1

to the kernel options in grub, as was suggested by Phoronix (see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a … ower&num=1) to save power.

There are also some issues during the boot process (apart from the backlight not toggled on by default), judging by the first line it seems to be related to the card reader (see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=124139). I haven't tried using the cardreader yet anyway, but still it's annoying because it slows down booting

[    8.368518] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic- xD/SD/M.S.       1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
[    8.368736] Bad LUN (0:1)
[    8.368852] Bad target number (1:0)

The laptop actually comes with an accelerometer as can be seen here and there's the AUR package

hpfall

which probably makes use of it to detect shocks and park the hd's heads. (also of interest: http://www.ianbmacdonald.com/wordpress/ … elerometer)

[    7.133311] hp_accel: laptop model unknown, using default axes configuration
[    7.136305] lis3lv02d: 8 bits 3DC sensor found
...
[    7.246864] input: ST LIS3LV02DL Accelerometer as /devices/platform/lis3lv02d/input/input5
[    7.246945] lis3lv02d: Cannot get IRQ

Note the last line. This happens because I added acpi=noirq to the kernel parameters but I'm probably not going to do anything about that.

I'd appreciate every single hint or idea which might solve any issue listed here.

Full dmesg output: http://pastebin.com/u2fUTcLy