Arch Linux

kuku

Member

Registered: 2013-01-19

Posts: 3

dell xps battery management - is it working on your machines ?

HI it's my first post and I see I'm registered for almost 6 years

I have an dell xps9360 and some dell laptops (including this one) have a pretty decent battery management.
Dell provides software for RH and ubunto to manage it.
I unpacked it to a folder and then I am running it, bot I'm getting an error :

cd opt/dell/dcc
sudo LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../srvadmin/lib64:. ./cctk
[sudo] password for kuku: 
Error communicating with BIOS - Unable to Get DMI Information!
Status = 0
bool SMBIOSPresent = 0
TableLength = 0

Unable to get BIOS tables or Unknown type encountered!!.

But got an error.
Can someone test it if it works ?

maximbaz

Package Maintainer (PM)

Registered: 2017-12-28

Posts: 54

Re: dell xps battery management - is it working on your machines ?

I've made it work and published to AUR as dell-command-configure, enjoy

g0tmk

Member

Registered: 2016-11-08

Posts: 2

Re: dell xps battery management - is it working on your machines ?

Would you mind sharing what you did to make it work? I'm trying to install it manually and getting the same error. I can't work out what the secret sauce is in the PKGBUILD source link. Thanks!

maximbaz

Package Maintainer (PM)

Registered: 2017-12-28

Posts: 54

Re: dell xps battery management - is it working on your machines ?

I think the secret sauce was just respecting the folder structure inside the Debian package archive... Try to follow the steps of the PKGBUILD exactly and see if you can make it work — definitely still works for me, was using this tool yesterday.

g0tmk

Member

Registered: 2016-11-08

Posts: 2

Re: dell xps battery management - is it working on your machines ?

Thanks for the followup, I poked around for a while and finally think I have a (semi-complete) grasp of what is going on.

TLDR; For me, the issue was I needed to reboot. For some reason I get the "Error communicating with BIOS : Unable to get DMI Structures by Context" error any time I try to use cctk after waking from sleep (which I do 99% of the time). I feel silly for not checking that sooner. I'm on an XPS9550 FWIW.

I looked at the output of `strace cctk` for the success and fail case and can't see much that would indicate why it is failing.. The program does a ton of reads from /dev/mem and apparently doesn't like what it sees there, because it then reads from `/sys/firmware/efi/systab` and exits. Odd since in the success case it doesn't read from the systab file at all. If anyone is interested in the output PM me and I can send it. I'm hesitant to post it publicly in case it has any personal info in it (I don't think it does).

I'll just treat it as a limitation for now. I may start a new thread in the future re: getting it to work after sleep since that is a pretty specific issue. Thanks again!