Seemingly random battery dissapearance

[Dave Flogeras]

Hi all

On my netbook I have noticed that occasionally when running on battery, it
will attempt to suspend due to my battery level being critically low (using
KDE 4.4/powerdevil for power management). By occasionally I mean, sometimes
I can get an enture (dis)charge out of the battery without it happening,
other times it might happen twice within a couple hours. Never more than
that.

The computer is a Gateway LT2102h netbook which I read is a rebranded Acer
Aspire One 532.  It has an Insyde H20 BIOS, which gateway doesn't seem to
have updates for (the netbook was only released a few months ago). I run
Gentoo Linux, and I have tried several kernels (.31, .32, .33 and the
.34-rc5). I have also tried the latest hal release 0.5.14 (currently
Gentoo's stable is 0.5.13) all to no avail.

I set up halevt to monitor my hal activity and when the problem happens I
see this:

Property
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer_power_supply_battery_BAT0:battery.remaining_time
modified (removed: 1, added: 0)

Also it seems from lshal that my battery is no longer there.

I have built my kernel with the old /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0 interface, and
if I run 'cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state' the battery comes back, and
halevt reports that the "battery.remaining_time" has been added again.

To me, it sounds like KDE nor HAL are at fault here. It would seem that it
is either a kernel, bios/ACPI, or hardware problem. I can rule out hardware
in a few days, as my friend has the same netbook which I will put my HDD in
and test with.

So I guess my question is, how can I drill deeper. Is there a userspace (or
otherwise) tool I can use to see why HAL is being told the battery
disappears? My ACPI knowledge is limited.  I tried enabling power management
debugging and ACPI debugging in the kernel, but didn't see anything unusual
(to my eyes).

Thanks for reading,
Dave
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