Asus F5GL doesn't shut down, nor returns battery status... (ACPI bug; proposed bugfix)

[Sergio Costas]

I have an Asus F5GL notebook, and there is some kind of bug in the ECDT table that prevents ACPI to work fine. When I do a suthdown, it doesn't power off; the battery status is incorrect... and much more. Reported here: <a href="http://www.linlap.com/wiki/asus+f5gl">http://www.linlap.com/wiki/asus+f5gl</a>.

Fortunately, in that page they talk about a patch that seems to fix this. The link for the patch is:

<a href="http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/1478/">http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/1478/</a>

and the problem description is:

<a href="http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11880">http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11880</a>

I made a diff between drivers/acpi/ec.c from kernels 2.6.27-11 (Intrepid Ibex), 2.6.28-7 (Jaunty Jackalope) and 2.6.29-rc5 (most modern, still RC, kernel, from kernel.org) and found that it seems that nearly all the changes between the two formers and the later are, mainly, to fix this bug, with a more elaborated patch which tests specifically for Asus products.

Since it seems that kernel 2.6.29 won't come before Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10), that means 8 months more with this nasty bug. Is it possible to do a backport for Intrepid Ibex and/or Jaunty Jackalope?

[Sergio Costas (rastersoft-gmail)]

5/Apr/2009: I tested Fedora 11 beta, which comes with kernel version 2.6.29, and works fine: the computer now shutdowns as expected and the battery applet works fine. I'll test other things as soon as I have some spare time.

[mutrax (ed-driesen)]

Dito with pro50gl (same hardware)
Also, none of the acpi related buttons seem to work.
I learned that al lot of ASUS laptops suffer from this error due to sloppy compiled acpi tables in the bios.

I ran this trough ASUS tech support, by asking if they had foreseen a bios update in the near future, and got a kinda rude reply.

So in other words, this bugfix will add a lot of "just works" to the list if fixed.

I'm happy to try out some workarouds/fixes f needed.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Raster,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid.

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 333064

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

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[Sergio Costas (rastersoft-gmail)]

With Ubuntu 9.10 works fine, so I'll close it.