Start by reading the Battery-Powered-mini-HOWTO.
For APM to work the machine's firmware must implement the APM Specification. Linux supports versions 1.0 through 1.2 of the standard. To work with Linux the APM BIOS must support 32-bit protected mode connections.
To display information about the APM BIOS
on your system you can run dmesg | grep apm command or look
in the /proc/apm file.
APM support consists of two parts: kernel support and user-land support.
You need a kernel that has the APM driver compiled in using the appropriate kernel configuration options. Currently most distributions do not ship kernels with the APM driver enabled so you may have to enable the driver using a boot option or to compile a custom kernel. Please see Kernel-HOWTO or your distribution manual for details.
The APM driver can be modularized but this is not recommended since many drivers will disable their APM features if the APM driver is not present when they initialize themselves.
The available APM options are (please see
Documentation/Configure.help in the kernel source
tree for more details):
CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_USER_SUSPEND Just a workaround for some NEC Versa M series laptops.
CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE Enable APM features at boot time.
CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE Puts CPU in power save mode, if there is nothing to do for the kernel.
CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK Some laptops can use this to turn off the LCD backlight when the screen blanker of the Linux virtual console blanks the screen. Note that this is only used by the virtual console screen blanker, and won't turn off the backlight when using the X Window system.
CONFIG_APM_POWER_OFF Turns the machine completely down, when using halt. This feature works with most laptops without problems.
CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_MULTIPLE_SUSPEND Just a workaround for IBM™ ThinkPad 560.
CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_SUSPEND_BOUNCE Just a workaround for Dell Inspiron 3200 and other notebooks.
CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT Stores time in Greenwich Mean Time format. It is in fact recommended to store GMT in your real time clock (RTC) in the BIOS.
CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS Resolves some problems with Suspend to Disk for some laptops, for instance many newer IBM™ ThinkPads.
CONFIG_SMP Symmetric Multi-Processing support. This enables support for systems with more than one CPU. If you have a system with only one CPU, like most personal computers, say N. Though the default seems to be Y. So it may be enabled if you are unaware. I have got reports that SMP support enabled does interfere with APM. So with a single CPU machine like a laptop you are on the save side, when you N.
Features of the APM driver according to the Kernel
documentation file Documentation/Configure.help:
"The system time will be reset after a USER RESUME operation, the
/proc/apm device will provide battery status
information, and user-space programs will receive notification of
APM events (e.g., battery status
change). "
The most important userland utility is apmd, a daemon that handles APM events.
If you run a 2.2.x or later kernel and want to experiment, Gabor Kuti <seasons_AT_falcon.sch.bme.hu> has made a kernel patch that allows you to hibernate any Linux system to disk, even if your computers APM BIOS doesn't support it directly. In my humble opinion you don't need this features if your laptop provides a function key to invoke suspend mode directly.
Please see the Battery Powered Linux Mini-HOWTO for detailed information.
Here's what apmd can do:
apmd(8): logs the battery status to syslog every now and then and runs a proxy script that can take action before suspend or after resume
apm(1): prints the current battery status or suspends the computer
apmsleep(1): suspends the machine for a limited time
xapm(1x): provides a battery meter for X11
libapm.a: a library for writing APM applications
Some APM firmware fails to restore mixer settings properly which can result in squeals of feedback in the music after the machine has resumed. A solution is to set up the proxy script so that it calls a mixer application after resume.
From the apmsleep(1) man page: Some computers, especially laptops, can wake up from a low-power suspend to DRAM mode using the Real-time clock (RTC) chip. Apmsleep can be used to set the alarm time in the RTC and to go into suspend or standby mode. An interrupt from the RTC causes the computer to wake-up. The program detects this event, by waiting for a leap in the kernel time and terminates successfully. If no time leap occurs within one minute, or something goes wrong, the exit value will be non-zero. Apmsleep is part of the apmd package.
In 2001 Richard Gooch wrote a simple apmd alternative which is available in the pmutils package.
Also, take a look at apmcd (apm based crontab) at ftp://ftp.binary9.net/pub/linux/ . This tool was written by Nicolas J. Leon <nicholas_AT_binary9.net>.
If you use another operating system at the same computer make sure that its "suspend" and "hibernate" features don't write to partitions that are used by Linux.
If your machine worked with 2.0.x kernels but not with the 2.2.x series, take this advice from Klaus Franken kfr_AT_klaus.franken.de : "The default changed in 2.2. Search in the init-scripts for halt and change it to halt -p or poweroff. See man halt , if you don't have this option you need a newer version of halt." You may find it in the SysVinit package.
On some new machines (for instance HP Omnibook 4150 - 366 MHz model)
when accessing /proc/apm,
you may get a kernel fault general protection fault: f000.
Stephen Rothwell
explaines: "This is your APM BIOS
attempting to use a real mode segment while in protected mode,
i.e. it is a bug in your BIOS. .. We have seen a few of
these recently, except all the others are in the power off
code in the BIOS where we can work around
it by returning to real mode before attempting to power off. Here we cannot do this."
According to Kernel docs
Documentation/Configure.help: "Some other things
you should try when experiencing seemingly random,
weird problems:
make sure that you have enough swap space and that it is enabled swapon -s.
pass the no-hlt option to the kernel.
switch on floating point emulation in the kernel and pass the no387 option to the kernel.
pass the floppy=nodma option to the kernel.
pass the mem=4M option to the kernel (thereby disabling all but the first 4 MB of RAM).
make sure that the CPU is not over clocked (doesn't seem suitable for mobile machines).
read the sig11 FAQ .
disable the cache from your BIOS settings.
install a fan for the video card or exchange video RAM (doesn't seem suitable for mobile machines).
install a better fan for the CPU (doesn't seem suitable for mobile machines).
exchange RAM chips (doesn't seem suitable for mobile machines).
exchange the motherboard (doesn't seem suitable for mobile machines).
From the PCMCIA-HOWTO: "Card Services can be compiled with support for APM (Advanced Power Management) if you've configured your kernel with APM support. ... The PCMCIA modules will automatically be configured for APM if a compatible version is detected on your system. Whether or not APM is configured, you can use cardctl suspend before suspending your laptop, and cardctl resume after resuming, to cleanly shut down and restart your PCMCIA cards. This will not work with a modem that is in use, because the serial driver isn't able to save and restore the modem operating parameters. APM seems to be unstable on some systems. If you experience trouble with APM and PCMCIA on your system, try to narrow down the problem to one package or the other before reporting a bug. Some drivers, notably the PCMCIA SCSI drivers, cannot recover from a suspend/resume cycle. When using a PCMCIA SCSI card, always use cardctl eject prior to suspending the system.".
Some machines have APM firmware that fails to save and restore display controller chip registers across a suspend. Earlier versions of the XFree86 X server did not restore the screen properly after resume, a problem which was addressed by Linux Laptops. However, contemporary versions of XFree86 mostly do the right thing.
Sometimes X and APM don't work smoothly together. The machine might even hang. A recommendation from Steve Rader: Some linux systems have their X11 server hang when doing apm -s. Folks with this affliction might want to switch to the console virtual terminal and then suspend chvt 1; apm -s as root, or, more appropiately sudo chvt 1; sudo apm -s. I have these commands in a script, say, my-suspend and then do xapmload --click-command my-suspend .
Software suspend enables the possibility of suspending a machine. It doesn't need APM. You may suspend your machine by either pressing Sysrq-d or with swsusp or shutdown -z (patch for sysvinit needed). It creates an image which is saved in your active swaps. By the next booting the kernel detects the saved image, restores the memory from it and then it continues to run as before you've suspended. If you don't want the previous state to continue use the noresume kernel option.
Software suspends may even be better than hibernate, because now I can suspend my Linux system, boot into Microsoft Windows, perform a few illegal operations and be shut down, and then restart my Linux setup exactly where I left off! This is something that cannot be done with hibernation, since that always restores the last state that you suspended from, be it Microsoft Windows or Linux. So if I want to switch to Microsoft Windows to play games or do anything else, I can leave my Linux desktop exactly as it is and return to how I left it.
In recent 2.6 kernels SoftWareSuspend is part of the kernel. You may find it in the section Power Management. But there are also backports to 2.4 available.
Since the original Software Suspend code was written by Gabor Kuti and Pavel Machek back in 1998, three different implementations have been created for the 2.6 kernel, all forks of the same original codebase.
TuxOnIce, former known as Software Suspend 2, has a long feature list, including the ability to cancel a suspend by pressing Escape, image compression to save time and space, a versatile plugin architecture, and support for machines with Highmem, preemption and SMP.
You may use the following entry in .bashrc
to show the battery level on the command prompt.
# Color the bash prompt in function of the percentage of battery
# with acpi subsystem.
# Based on the originally apm based script that has been posted
# on debian-laptop by
# Jason Kraftcheck <kraftche at cae.wisc.edu>.
#
# This script is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 or later,
# see /usr/share/common-licences/GPL on a Debian system or
# http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html on the web.
# (c) 2003 Fabio 'farnis' Sirna <farnis at libero dot it>
function acpi_percent()
{
if [ `cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state | grep present: |cut -d\ -f18` = "yes" ]; then
{
CAPACITY=`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info |grep "design capacity:"|cut -d\ -f11`
LEVEL=`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state | grep remaining|cut -d\ -f8`
ACPI_PERCENT=`echo $(( $LEVEL * 100 / $CAPACITY ))`
if [ "$LEVEL" = "$CAPACITY" ]; then
echo FULL
else
echo $ACPI_PERCENT%
fi
}
else echo "NO BATTERY"
fi
}
function acpi_charge()
{
ACPI_CHARGE=`cat /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC/state | cut -d\ -f20`
case $ACPI_CHARGE in
*on-line*)
ACPI_CHARGE="+" ;;
*off-line*)
ACPI_CHARGE="-" ;;
esac
echo $ACPI_CHARGE
}
function acpi_color()
{
if [ "$(acpi_charge)" = "+" ]; then
{
if [ `cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state | grep present: |cut -d\ -f18` = "no" ]; then
echo "0;31"
else echo "1;32"
fi
}
else
case $(acpi_percent) in
10?%) echo "0;32" ;;
9?%) echo "0;32" ;;
8?%) echo "0;32" ;;
7?%) echo "0;32" ;;
6?%) echo "0;32" ;;
5?%) echo "0;32" ;;
4?%) echo "0;33" ;;
3?%) echo "0;33" ;;
2?%) echo "0;33" ;;
1?%) echo "0;31" ;;
?%) echo "0;31;5" ;;
*) echo "0;35" ;;
esac
fi
}
function acpi_color_prompt
{
PS1='\[\e[$(acpi_color)m\][$(acpi_charge)$(acpi_percent)][\t] \u:\w\$>\[\e[0;37m\] '
}
# linux console
if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
PROMPT_COMMAND=acpi_color_prompt
fi
function echo_acpi
{
echo -n "($(acpi_charge)$(acpi_percent)) "
}
All "normal" Debian GNU/Linux kernels are APM capable, they just need an append
line added to the boot loader configuration file (e.g. /etc/lilo.conf.
append="apm=on"
You might use the following parameters (with the appropriate changes)
in your boot loader configuration file (e.g. /etc/lilo.conf
to experiment with ACPI and APM, when compiled in the same kernel.
Usage of APM and ACPI at the same time doesn't work, see Kernel docs for
details.
append="acpi=off apm=on"