Maybe I’m missing the obvious, but what exactly is this numeric field in the Battery Status popup?
I thought it might be available time at current charge, but it’s rather high, and varies wildly!
It is, but it is calculated, and some Laptops doesn’t reports any meaningful Information.
DSDT have OS specific codepaths, i don’t know which ID does Haiku using, maybe the selected codepath in your DSDT is just a horrible broken one.
Afaik this called as quirk and one have to create a workaround for every problematic computer. (-> time, human resource, etc).
Or you can debug it, and if it because the silly DSDT implementation then you can complain for the Laptop manufacturer.
But After all, make a Ticket to let us know, which Laptops are affected.
Before you asks, DSDT is responsible for the advanced Features like battery Meter, backlight control, sleep and hibernate, energy Support, throttling (ok, SSDT), actually it provides the control Logic and the interface for the OS to mess with.
And it checks for the running OS, to be able to communicate with, but frequently it uses different codepath for different OS.
Bootman doesnt have any way (yet) to override it. Maybe it should.
Maybe the quirks should be collected with workarounds, to be used by Haiku automatically.
Maybe the hw manufacturers should go into hell.
This should be the remaining battery lifetime. We get the info from the ACPI BIOS, and as miqlas written, it is possible that your computer reports strange values there. Maybe it only works when the battery is actually dischrging, or maybe it is just always bogus.
We can’t do much about this, as there isn’t really a way to detect such problems in general. It would be possible to implement specific workarounds for known broken machines, but I don’t know if we can do anything better than hiding the value then.
Heh. Thanks! The laptop is one specially built for Linux (“Zareason”), and dual-boots Linux and Haiku. (Actually quintuple-boots: 3 Haiku and 2 Linux partitions.) Not having looked closely before, I went into Linux to see what the battery popup said there. Initially it looked good, showing “Discharging. 4 hours and 49 minutes remaining”. So I plugged in the charger and got “Charging. 42 minutes until fully charged”. Then I unplugged… the result? “1 hour and 32 minutes remaining”!
So it’s crazy in both OSs. But the % value (or bar graph in Linux) seems stable and correct, and that’s the main datapoint I need. So I guess it’s once of those things not to worry about!
Ta!
having similar problems with my ibm thinkpad x41?
beos: battery lifetime/percentage is (more or less) precise
haiku: values are jumping and annoying warnings, even with full charge
I’ve been having some issues with the battery meter disappearing altogether, installing it in deskbar again has no effect on it.
Looks like something broke in the latest builds.
Is the battery status code different between x86 and x86_64 builds of Haiku?
I’m asking because I get an empty battery icon (no battery found) with x86 and a fully working battery meter with x86_64.
I had the same experience, see ticket #13920.
Frederik may have fixed it already with hrev51771, but since updating the system is still broken (see ticket #13937), we’ll have to wait to confirm or build Haiku ourselves.
Allright! I thought my hardware was unsupported in the x86 build there for a while. Thinking of moving from x86_64 to x86, but the performance difference is very noticable between the two (at least on a 1.4ghz Core 2 Duo) and the misfunctioning battery meter made me make the decition to stick with x86_64, at least for a little while longer 