IBM Thinkpad T21 and ACPI

[Setras]

Hi!

I hope I'm posting this to the right forum. Anyway, I have a T21 and I can't seem to get ACPI and the Thinkpad buttons (tpb + ibm-acpi + nvram) to work. When I boot up my computer everything works just fine for a while, but then all of a sudden acpid stops receiving events (like unplugging the ac adapter) and tpb just stops working. Nothing shows up in any system log I know to search for entries (/var/log/messages and /var/log/acpid) and 'ps -A' run as root still shows both tpb and acpid running. The trouble is, everything appears to be running just fine, but acpi/tpb stuff just doesn't work. Also, when shutting down the laptop, it stops all the services but just sits there displaying 'Power down' after 'Mounting remaining filesystems read-only' until I manually turn it off by pressing the power button for a few seconds. To solve the shutting down problem I disabled local apic in my kernel, but it didn't help, so I'm starting to think the problem is connected to acpi somehow. All in all, I don't even know where to start looking for the cause of all this, so all help would be very much appreciated.

Since this is propably relevant info, I'm running gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r6 with acpi and nvram built into the kernel. However, the IBM laptop extras in the kernel are not enbaled; instead I'm using ibm-acpi-0.11-r1(loaded as a module) found in portage. I have tpb-0.6.3 and acpid-1.0.4-r2 and I have ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86 ~x86" in make.conf. If there's anything else that might be relevant, let me know and I'll post the info.

Setras
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[wally.hall]

If you compile the features in the kernel and compile them as modules, you can easily load and unload them to see what works/doesn't work. Chances are they'll be far more stable and reliable than something not written by the kernel developers and not found in the kernel sources!

Yes, it does sound like ACPI might be b0rking up, check in the BIOS there's nothing which may be turning it off or a key combination (Fn+something) which can do something crazy like turn ACPI events off (it's unlikely, but I once disabled my wireless doing that, and then spent days getting really annoyed with Linux for my wifi not working! lol).

Other than that, I can't help you much I'm afraid. I'm on a Dell laptop and the ACPI very fortunally worked pretty much out of the box, so I don't know too much about debuging what's happening too well.

You say you've checked your logs, if you post the last 10 or so entries from each one, I might notice something subtle, (I'm sure you would have noticed anything obvious, but sometimes a second pair of eyes can pick up on something subtle!), you've done all the right things though, so we'll have to have a play around and see.

E-Mail me or IM if you want, I'll keep an eye out and have a look on Google for you, see what I can find.

Take care,

wally
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