null pointer dereference in acpi-call remains unfixed on 20.04 HWE kernels

[Matthew Bradley]

Due to a change between kernel 5.11 and 5.13, out-of-date versions of acpi call produce a kernel null pointer dereference when accessed by tlp. This was previously reported, verified, and patched in [1] but remains unfixed for the vast majority of ubuntu releases.

The fix is to update acpi-call from 1.1.0-x to 1.2.2-1. This was only done for the in-development Jammy Jellyfish release. However, both Impish Indri and Focal Fossa have recently moved from 5.11 to 5.13 via HWE kernels. The version of acpi-call for these releases has not been updated and continues to produce null pointer differences, in addition to the accumulation of kernel dumps in NVRAM which can result in bricking some laptops.

Please backport the updated version of acpi-call from Jammy Jellyfish to Impish Indri and Focal Fossa.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-call/+bug/1953261

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Peter J. Mello (roguescholar)]

In case anyone else happens to land here and similarly discover that Ubuntu's backporting game is still atrocious, I wanted to leave a signpost to the work of Launchpad user @linrunner, who backported these patches to Focal and keeps said package available in the PPA for his TLP project, available at:

https://launchpad.net/~linrunner/+archive/ubuntu/tlp