Thursday, October 28, 2010

Lenovo Wifi behaviour still magical

The behaviour of the wifi on the Lenovo S10-3 continues to puzzle me. It continues to be magical and that feels uncomfortable. The magic is that I need to make the netbook sleep (Fn+F1) and then press the power button. Usually, the wifi will work. Occasionally, I need to repeat these steps.

This worked on Ubuntu netbook edition. It worked on Meego and Arch Linux. But I just haven't been able to get this magic to work on Smeegol from Suse.

There must be a difference. Looking at the logs, I found that if ACPI has an exception on waking from sleep state S3, bluetooth is recognised and wifi starts to work. The following extract from Ubuntu log file is indicative of each os.

Oct 27 14:55:36 anil-laptop kernel: [  690.604909] Initializing CPU#1
Oct 27 14:55:36 anil-laptop kernel: [  690.729043] CPU1 is up
Oct 27 14:55:36 anil-laptop kernel: [  690.729260] ACPI: Waking up from system sleep state S3
Oct 27 14:55:36 anil-laptop kernel: [  696.684074] ACPI Exception: AE_TIME, Returned by Handler for [EmbeddedControl] (20100428/evregion-474)
Oct 27 14:55:36 anil-laptop kernel: [  696.684099] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.EC0_.DSSV] (Node f7023f78), AE_TIME
Oct 27 14:55:36 anil-laptop kernel: [  696.684174] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_WAK] (Node f7023030), AE_TIME
Oct 27 14:55:36 anil-laptop kernel: [  696.684370] ACPI Exception: AE_TIME, During Method _WAK (20100428/hwsleep-601)
Oct 27 14:55:36 anil-laptop kernel: [  696.719069] PM: early resume of devices complete after 1.912 msecs

However, on Suse's Smeegol, I just could not get it to show this exception.

On Ubuntu, the system wakes up whether the power button is pressed or sleep hotkey (Fn+F1) is pressed again. However, if the power button is pressed, the ACPI exception will normally show up and wifi works. But if the sleep hotkey is pressed, the exception rarely occurs and wifi does not work.

The next step would be to try the lenovo-laptop driver and hope that the wireless hotkey works and I do not need the above magic any more.

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