Re: kpowersave stuck at battery charging

From: Alexey Starikovskiy
Date: Wed Jan 02 2008 - 11:19:00 EST


Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
On Wednesday 02 January 2008, Alexey Starikovskiy wrote:
Andrey Borzenkov wrote:
This is did not happen before; I am not sure right now what caused this
(i.e.
battery aging or some software change) nor whether this is
kernel/HAL/kpowersave
issue.

kpowersave is stuck at assuming battery is loading and at 94%. Sysfs
displays
battery state as Full:

Frequent battery charging shortens lifetime of the battery, so some (may be all now)
notebook manufacturers do not start charging battery until it discharge to some degree (~90%).

I thought Li-Ion batteries do not have memory effect. Actually I remember to have read recommendation to avoid deep discharges of Li-Ion battery, it was adviced to charge it as often as possible.
IBM has advice to not re-charge battery until it discharged to 95%.
It was implemented in their batteries/notebooks.
There is no memory effect in Li-Ion batteries, there is only limited number of
charge cycles -- about 1000 times, thus "as often as possible" is advice
of the battery seller :)
It could be your case. Please try to discharge battery to, say, 89% and then check if it charges to the
100%.

That is exactly the question - how do you compute 100%? As far as I can tell the only possibility is - when battery stops charging. At this point you have to assume battery is fully charged.
Last charge would be good reference. Think of the battery as constantly
degrading resource.
I tried to discharge battery (it was around 78%) and plug AC in again. It went on Charging until the same limit after that state changed to Full (well, in case of ACPI battery we really only can state - not (dis-)charging, there is no special Full state flag); kpowersave still believes battery is not fully charged. Main interface shows 84% (no Charging) - tooltip states it is being charged.

So, that is the state of your battery. If you buy new one, it will go high again.

Regards,
Alex.
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