HDA Analyzer

The HDA Analyzer tool that allows one to look at the raw HD-audio control data in an easy to user GUI. The instructions on how to download and use this tool are described at the HDA Analyzer page - they are as follows:

1. Fetch:

wget -O run.py http://www.alsa-project.org/hda-analyzer.py

2. Run:

python run.py

And browse...

This certainly takes the pain out of looking at the control information.

Saving power on my HPMini (revisited on Lucid)

A while ago I blogged about power saving on my HPMini. Well, today I'm revisiting this using today's Lucid daily and I'm pleased to see that I can save a small amount of power with Lucid compared to Karmic. However, the difference is small - the inaccuracies of estimating power consumption using ACPI may be more significant.

My steps were as follows:

0. Run powertop for about 15 minutes on battery power and note down the recommended power saving tricks.

1. Blacklist Bluetooth, since I don't use this and it really sucks a load of power. To do so, add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

blacklist btusb

2. Enable HDA audio powersaving:

echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save

3. Increase dirty page writeback time:

echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

4. Disable the webcam driver (not sure exactly if this saves much power), add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

blacklist uvcvideo

5. Turn down the screen brightness (this saves 0.3 Watts)

6. Disable desktop effects to save some power used by compositing.

7. Disable cursor blinking on the gnome terminal to save 2 wakeups a second, using:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink_mode off

I managed to push the power consumption down to ~6.5 Watts which is an improvement of nearly 1 Watt from my tests on Karmic. Not bad, but I don't fully trust the data from the battery/ACPI and I really need to see how much extra battery life these tweaks give me when I'm using the machine on my travels.

On an idle machine I'm seeing > ~99.0% C4 residency, which is quite acceptable. Running powertop is always leads to insights to saving power, so kudos to Intel for this wonderful utility.

Installing Intel Microcode Updates

It is not unknown for personal computers to be shipped with subtle and rarely occurring bugs in the x86 processor. Normally these bugs can be fixed with microcode updates that get loaded by the BIOS at boot time. However, re-flashing a BIOS may be deemed to risky (since it can brick a machine) or perhaps one can no longer get BIOS updates to an older machine.

This is where the Intel microcode updates come in useful. To install these on Ubuntu use:

sudo apt-get install intel-microcode

These may then fix subtle bugs, so it's always worth a try when you see strange processor related issues such inexplicable memory related oopses.

The caveat is that the microcode is loaded late in boot time, so you may not be able to workaround bugs in the early boot phase. For example, when coming out of hibernate you may hit a processor related bug that's fixed with the microcode update - however, the microcode is loaded late into the resume from hibernate phase, so it cannot be fixed this way.

Debugging ACPI using acpiexec

The acpiexec tool is an AML emulator that allows one to execute and interactively ACPI AML code from your BIOS.  The tarball can be downloaded from the ACPICA website  and built as follows:

1. Unzip and untar the acica-unix-20100304.tar.gz tarball.
2. cd into tools/acpiexec
3. run make

This should build acpiexec. Now for the fun part - executing your ACPI inside the emulator. To do this grab your ACPI tables and extract them using:

sudo acpidump > acpi.info && acpixtract -a acpi.info

Now load these tables into the emulator and run with verbose mode:

./acpiexec -v *.dat

Inside the emulator you can type help to navigate around the help system.  It may take a little bit of work to get familiar with all the commands available.

As a quick introduction, here is how to execute the battery information _BIF method.

1. Get a list of all the available methods, type:

methods

on my Lenovo laptop the battery information method is labelled \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.BAT1._BIF, so to execute this method I use:

execute \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.BAT1._BIF
Executing \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.BAT1._BIF
Execution of \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.BAT1._BIF returned object 0x19669d0 Buflen 178
  [Package] Contains 13 Elements:
    [Integer] = 0000000000000001
    [Integer] = 0000000000000FA0
    [Integer] = 0000000000000FA0
    [Integer] = 0000000000000001
    [Integer] = 0000000000002B5C
    [Integer] = 00000000000001A4
    [Integer] = 000000000000009C
    [Integer] = 0000000000000108
    [Integer] = 0000000000000EC4
    [String] Length 08 = PA3465U
    [String] Length 05 = 3658Q
    [String] Length 06 = Li-Ion
    [String] Length 07 = COMPAL

So far so good. I single stepped through the code using the debug command on the method as follows:

debug \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.BAT1._BIF

at each % prompt, one can press enter to step the next instruction. If the method requires arguments, these can be passed into the method by specifying them after the method name from the debug command.

To see any local variables used during execution, use the locals command. The list command lists the current AML instructions. The set commands allows one to set method data and interact with the debugging processes.

Hopefully this gives one a taste of what the emulator can do. The internal help is enough to get one up and running, and one does generally require the current ACPI specification to figure out what's happening in your ACPI tables.