ACPI et al on Dell Latiture D830

[Ian Smith]

On Fri, 7 Mar 2008 knowtree at aloha.com wrote:

 > I installed FreeBSD 7.0 RC1 on a Dell Latitude D830 and am having the same
 > kinds of problems described here previously on similar hardware and FreeBSD
 > 6.3.  Disappointments include:
 > 
 >     o No suspend (well, no wake up after)
 > 
 >     o Broadcom Wifi "card" invisible
 > 
 >     o No sound from speakers

Can't comment on the wifi or sound problems, though others likely can.

 > Any chance installing 7.0-RELEASE will improve anything? Is there anything
 > I can do to help get Suspend and ACPI working better?

There have been a fair few problems with various Latitudes in this
respect, going on posts to freebsd-acpi over the last couple of years
(which is where I would suggest pursuing this issue in more detail), ie
by showing your 'sysctl hw.acpi' and dmesg and such .. you may be asked
to make asl disassembly available (acpidump(8)) to hunt problems, see
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/acpi-debug.html

For starters you might try
 # sysctl hw.syscons.sc_no_suspend_vtswitch=1
with both
 # sysctl hw.acpi.reset_video=1
and
 # sysctl hw.acpi.reset_video=0

Sadly, htdig searching of the list archives is mostly broken, but the
very first search done from an archive index page such as:

 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-acpi/

should give something, eg from there I got some hits for 'Latitude D8'

eg this one trying with the above sysctls on a D810:

 http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-acpi/2006-February/002509.html

but you may have to browse quite a few months by thread to hunt deeper,
and it may be easier to start a fresh thread.

 > CPU SPEED
 > 
 > While exploring Suspend I came across the sysctls for CPU speed stuff.
 > Among them was one for CPU temperature, which read 44.5C. Is there a Gnome
 > panel gizmo for this? I'm picturing a volcano.

gkrellm (/usr/ports/sysutils/gkrellm) works well for me, setup to
display temp and MHz with cpu load (and much more) on my Thinkpad T23.

 > I discovered that the Gnome panel gizmo "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor"
 > does allow me the throttle my CPU up and down -- very cool -- but I want
 > this to be automatic in response to both CPU temperature and process load.

That's what powerd(8) is for.  Try it out in foreground as 'powerd -v'
in a terminal window.  Play with the idle/busy percentage flags until
happy, then add powerd_enable="YES" (and powerd_flags="whatever" if
using other than defaults) to /etc/rc.conf. 

 > I have been going blind staring at the ACPI man page trying to understand
 > where to begin. Does anyone have tips on how to get this working?

ACPI's easy once you know how; I'm up with it maybe 30% after 2 years :)

Cheers, Ian