Arch Linux

MicheleSanna

Member

Registered: 2025-10-23

Posts: 12

When the battery is low my laptop reboots instead of shutting down

I have a freshly installed Arch Linux and the Cosmic Desktop Environment.
As said in the title, when my laptop is out of battery (2%) it reboots instead of shutting down, this causes the battery to completely drain.
This wouldn't be a problem if, once plugged to the charger, the laptop would turn on normally. But once the battery is drained, for some reason the BIOS lose its memory, so it forgets date/time, reanables secure boot and intel RTS, and most importantly doesn't recognize the SSD with arch as a bootable device (basically to make the things work again, I have to reinstall GRUB from the flash drive).

I don't know if it actually tries to reboot or if it tries to shutdown but something goes wrong and it reboots, but this is a big problem because I can't trust leaving the laptop without the charger.

I already tried to modify the CriticalPowerAction variable contained in etc/UPower/Upower.conf, but it didn't helped.

Thank you for reading this so far and sorry for my bad english. Help me please, I'm desperate

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,086

Re: When the battery is low my laptop reboots instead of shutting down

Are you doing anything like https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop … tery_level - and if: what exactly?
If not, there's a high chance that the system doesn't shut down (also inspect the journal from those reboots on whether there's a controlled shutdown) but powers off - likely because the low battery cannot deliver sufficient voltage.
The systems behavior on such power loss events is defined in the firmware (UEFI) on what to do after a sudden power loss.

=> Workaround: implement the approach in the link and use a charge higher than what seems to be a critical 2% (4% ?)

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