HAL battery event flood? Help

[Sean]

On Sun, 2007-10-21 at 12:55 -0700, Sean wrote: 
> On Sun, 2007-10-21 at 19:28 +0200, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> > On Sonntag, 21. Oktober 2007, Sean wrote:
> > > Hello, Was wondering if anyone could provide some advice on an issue I
> > > am seeing with Hal on a fresh gutsy install. The symptom is when I start
> > > my laptop with a second battery installed the hald process consumes like
> > > 40% of my CPU continuously.  Running hald in with verbose output shows
> > > that it is getting hammered with battery events, like 100 per second.
> > > My first reaction is that this is what is causing the CPU usage as I do
> > > not see this with one battery. What I don't understand is hald the
> > > 'victim' of something else gone haywire or the cause :)
> > >
> > [...]
> > >
> > > Any advice is appreciated!
> > 
> > I would say the kernel or your hardware is may the problem. Start acpi_listen 
> > and see how many events you get from your battery. The HAL log show you only 
> > that HAL get several events per second from your battery. HAL have to react 
> > on them, what may cause the high load.
> > 
> > Danny
> 
> Thanks for the quick reply.  I agree that HAL reacting on all of those
> events seems to be the cause of the high load.  I would have leaned
> towards hardware or kernel too, except I didn't see this issue when
> using Hal 0.5.8.1.  To verify, I just forced the install of hal 5.8.1
> (leaving everything else as-is) and the issue goes away.  Maybe this
> older version doesn't latch on to the dbus channel that is doing the
> flooding in the latter version.  
> 
> Here is what I've found so far.  If I leave hal 5.9.1 in place, I see
> the flood of battery events coming from acpi_listen.  However, if I run
> hal 5.8.1, the output of acpi_listen is what it should be and no floods
> jsut normal trickle of events.  
> 
> Any idea what in HAL could change the behavior of events that you see in
> acpi_listen?
> 
> Thanks again,
> Sean

Made some small debugging progress.  I have hal 5.9.1 installed now
again, and found that deleting /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-acpi 'fixes' the
immediate issue.  No more flooding of battery events, no huge CPU draw.
acpi_listen now shows the normal amount of battery events for when I
unplug and plug in the ac adapter, etc.  Not sure what functionality I
lose, but seems to indicates something in this binary is not liking my
system. Any clues?

- Sean