Laptop-mode-tools fixes and improvements

Question

I have been in contact with the autor of laptop-mode-tools and new version is coming some time next month or maybe even in March. So I decided to share my tweaks because some things are broken right now and some need improvements.
There are some modules I don't use and so didn't notice any problems with them, if there are any (lcd-brightness, video-out and those for which I don't have suitable hardware like cpufreq, iwl/ipw and sched-mc).
Alright then, first is the problem with systems where the battery doesn't report events and has no alarm support on which the auto-hibernate module depends. There is a script from gentoo-wiki which is quite popular among people with lousy batteries. It would be great if the package manager would take care of it for us. Author of laptop-mode-tools also said (on debian lists) that such script could be included in future versions, for now the common "solution" is to create a cronjob that calls /usr/sbin/laptop_mode every few minutes. I don't quite like it compared to the gentoo script. For now I include the script in the package as /usr/sbin/battery_mode and call it from rc.local on boot.
Currently there is a module called ac97-powersave that controls power management on those sound cards. Intel HDA sound cards also support this and in the future versions a module them will probably be included. For now I patch the ac97-powersave module to include the support for Intel HDA.
Bluetooth module removes bluetooth and hci_usb modules when disabling the device. However on my system it's not enough to completly turn it off. For now I patch the bluetooth module to include rfkill support. Only then the system reports a USB disconnect and the LED goes off. The default path in the patch is for my acer system with acer-wmi rfkill support.
Due to w differences the dpms-standby module is broken on many systems. The module uses xset and arguments are piped from the command w -hs where the third field is supposed to be DPMS_SCREEN but it's actually IDLE time, so xset command fails because the argument passed to xset -d is something like 4:54. On Debian/Ubuntu they went around this by including this in their acpi-support package. I didn't bother to see what they actually did, to backport it. It should be done in future laptop-mode-tools anyway. For now I just hardcode the display value for my single-user/one-X-screen system in the dpms-standby module.
Due to a simple mistake LM_VERBOSE was broken. Meaning that none of those informative status messages from laptop-mode-tools were logged when VERBOSE LOGGING was enabled. Only the output of called commands was logged. For now I fix this in the build process.
Speaking of logging, default output for verbose is /dev/stdout, and I would like to log everything to a file. So I modify it in the build process to log everything to /var/log/laptop-mode.log, and also include a logrotate script in the package. With the above fix I have a complete and informative log file.
It's not a bad idea to stop/restart laptop-mode-tools when suspending, so a pm-utils hook is helpful. Arch PKGBUILD already includes installing pm-utils support but it's actually pbbuttonsd/pmud support and not pm-utils. Such a script/hook could one day be included in laptop-mode-tools however there is/was a debate going if it's their job to provide it. I read somewhere that Ubuntu already provides such script/hook but I'm not sure if it's provided by acpi-support or laptop-mode-tools package. For now I wrote my own pm-utils hook and I include it in the build process.
Powertop suggests usbcore.autosuspend=1 sysctl, but it would be nice if we have all this power management control in one place. Usb-autosuspend module will be included in future versions of laptop-mode-tools, but for now someone wrote a module and posted it to the Debian bug tracker. I keep the module and configuration in my build dir but don't include it in the final package for now. I'll wait a bit and see how things will develop.
To help you start hacking on laptop-mode-tools you can take a look at all the above patches and my PKGBUILD. Every step is documented in PKGBUILD comments, and please do check them because some things I patch but some I modify inline with sed. I also don't install acpid handlers and before mentioned false pm-utils support... everything is commented: http://sysphere.org/~anrxc/local/softwa … ode-tools/

Answer 1

Hello,
this was one year ago, and I helped the author improve these things. Today I don't have to patch my laptop-mode-tools... (I still do with some minor things, but that's just to satisfy some personal preferences . Use the arch package, even the battery polling helper is included.