A few days ago (hmmm, probably corresponding to a reboot to 2.6.32-5-amd64), my /var/log/pm-powersave.log started growing rapidly with an entry per second of: /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/sched-powersave false: **sched policy powersave OFF success. Not good for powersaving if it keeps the disk spun up and CPU churning executing /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/sched-powersave all the time!
pm-powersave should only be run, when you plug/unplug your ac adapater. Did you repeatedly unplug power? Do you get those messages when you don't change between battery and ac? Try to monitor the log file with "tail -f /var/log/pm-powersave.log" please. Michael
Woops, I assumed the file was being rotated daily, and there are 3 large pm-powersave.log files followed by 2 more small files with reasonable amounts of log messages. It turns out they're being rotated monthly, and the large amount of logging started back in May. I don't know what specific package upgrade is at fault, I'm afraid. No. As I said, it grows at a rate of approx. 1 per second. /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/sched-powersave false:**sched policy powersave OFF success. /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/sched-powersave false:**sched policy powersave OFF success. Over and over again. So far, up to 117MB this month since last being rotated. There is a battery fault in this laptop (old battery, still holds some charge, but causes the battery LED to blink red - perhaps causing excess acpi messages, and getting pm-utils confused? But the battery has been in this state a lot longer than since this bug appeared). This bug does not affect my other Dell laptop running 2.6.34-1. (fortunate that this doesn't break my backup scheme, given that such messages are extremely compressable).
Turns out that the acpi scripts are/were crap, and just trigger pm-utils on every battery event, as I suspected. Apologies if this is all dealt with in an update of acpi-support (I suspect I'm several versions behind in acpi, because I'm so reluctant to upgrade it given that something different breaks everytime I upgrade - but I shall attempt to test when I get home tonight). If I modify /etc/acpi/events/battery and /etc/acpi/events/ac to include %e: ================================ # /etc/acpi/events/ac # Called when the user connects ac power to us # event=ac_adapter.* action=/etc/acpi/power.sh %e ================================ ================================ # /etc/acpi/events/battery # Called when AC power goes away and we switch to battery event=battery.* action=/etc/acpi/power.sh %e ================================ And /etc/acpi/power.sh is buggy in that $* is always != "", because $1 is the name of the script, /etc/acpi/power.sh, and without %e, there are no other parameters. If I add a debug statement at the top of /etc/acpi/power.sh, echo "`date`: /etc/acpi/power.sh $@" >> /tmp/test.log I get the following: Wed Jul 28 14:30:28 EST 2010: /etc/acpi/power.sh battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001 Wed Jul 28 14:30:29 EST 2010: /etc/acpi/power.sh battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001 Wed Jul 28 14:30:30 EST 2010: /etc/acpi/power.sh battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001 Wed Jul 28 14:30:32 EST 2010: /etc/acpi/power.sh battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001 I haven't investigated yet (I'll followup when I get home later today), but that's probably a battery failure message. I wouldn't be surprised if ACPI has provision to log similar events if the ac adaptor were to detect problems such as overheating or overload, but unforunately, power.sh just unconditionally hands all battery.* and ac_adaptor.* messages onto pm-powersave, which unconditionally changes the power mode and logs messages without checking whether this is sane. I don't know where this bug more belongs, pm-powersave, or acpi-support? I suspect acpi-support for not actually passing anything onto the script to identify what acpi event occurred. But pm-powersave is going to have to do something useful with that message. For instance, I want to log and act upon when ac/battery is turned off, but all I'm told is "true" "false". True/false what? Elephants?
Dear submitter, as the package pm-utils has just been removed from the Debian archive unstable we hereby close the associated bug reports. We are sorry that we couldn't deal with your issue properly. For details on the removal, please see https://bugs.debian.org/1058701 The version of this package that was in Debian prior to this removal can still be found using https://snapshot.debian.org/. Please note that the changes have been done on the master archive and will not propagate to any mirrors until the next dinstall run at the earliest. This message was generated automatically; if you believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org. Debian distribution maintenance software pp. Thorsten Alteholz (the ftpmaster behind the curtain)