Simple ACPI monitoring tools

Back to basics - here are a couple of quick-and-easy tools for seeing ACPI activity on linux. The first is acpi_listen (from the acpid package) - this tool simply monitors ACPI events and dumps them to stdout:

$ acpi_listen
button/power PWRF 00000080 00000001
ac_adapter AC0 00000080 00000000

The above shows the events when I hit the power button and suspend a HP mini netbook.  One can specify the number of events to capture before exiting with the -c flag, and also the number of seconds to wait for with the -t flag. As things go, it's a handy sanity checking tool to make sure things like specific button events get handled correctly.

The next tool is acpitail - this periodically dumps out ACPI status about the battery, fan and temperature to stdout. One can specify the update polling intervals for checking state change using various flags.  To install use:

sudo apt-get install acpitail

and to use, simply run:

$ acpitail

Wed Jan 20 20:40:14 2010
BAT1 remaining capacity: 88% (126 minutes)
Adapter AC0: batteries
temperature THRM: 47 (ok)
Wed Jan 20 20:40:19 2010
temperature THRM: 46 (ok)
Wed Jan 20 20:40:29 2010
temperature THRM: 45 (ok)

..again, it's another simple tool to do some ACPI state sanity checking.