Linux on the Twinhead efio! 15B Laptop

Specs

• CPU: Intel Pentium-M (Dothan)
• Chipset: Intel 855PM
• Graphics: ATI Radeon 9700
• Display: 15" TFT @ SXGA+ resolution (1400x1050)
• RAM: 512 MB DDR
• Harddisk: Hitachi IC25N060ATMR04-0 with 60 GB
• Optical: built-in CD-RW drive (QSI CD-RW/DVD-ROM SBW-241)
• Network: 100 MBit/s LAN (Intel PRO/100 VE), 802.11g WLAN (Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG)
• Modem: Intel AC97
• Audio: Intel AC97
• IrDA
• VGA and TV-Out
• Firewire: 1 small port (1394a)
• USB: 3 ports (2.0)
• PC-Card: 1 slot
• Weight (including battery): 3.5 kg
• See the Twinhead product page.

BIOS

You can reach the BIOS via <DEL>. Hitting <F11> on startup lets you choose between several boot devices (hard disk, cd, removable). The BIOS was flashed with version 1.02 which is only available via the technical support of Twinhead. The new BIOS should remove the bug which made the fans of the machine run all the time when MS Windows XP with Service Pack 2 was used. The fans still run all the time in Linux.

Installation

The machine is installed with Novell/SuSE 9.1 which was a rather painless procedure. Afterwards, kernel 2.6.9-rc4 was installed.

Boot

Unfortunately, the system hangs on boot at several places: cupsd, SMPPD, hardware scan on boot, cron. After approx. 5 minutes for each service, it continues. This did not happen with the original BIOS with kernel 2.6.9-rc4 (but with kernel 2.6.7).
On shutdown, the system is unable to unmount the root and home partitions and cannot turn off the machine. This looks like a software problem but it is believed to have its roots in the area of hardware (or a broken kernel due to an oops mentioned below).

Keyboard

A funny thing occurs when typing "lin" fast enough (that is flying fingers in a 10-finger-system): the keyboard manages to slip an "f" into that string: "lifn". Yes, one-handed, no fingers near the key labelled "f".

Screen

XFree86

XFree86 runs out of the box with the free radeon driver. Unfortunately, this driver does not supply 3D acceleration for the Radeon 9700 at the moment, so you have to switch to the proprietary driver from ATI. The proprietary driver is yet untested.

TouchPad

The touchpad works fine, either with the plain PS/2 driver or with the synaptics driver which can be configured via SAX2.

Console

The standard frambuffer driver vesafb works just fine in XGA resolution.

Network

LAN

The network interface works with the e100 driver. But pinging other computers feels slow and it is impossible to use a graphical browser such as konqueror which seems to freeze after drawing its first visuals. w3m, on the other hand, works.

WLAN

WLAN should work with the driver ipw2200 from IPW, but was not tested.

Power and Configuration Management

ACPI

ACPI does not work properly, the process which tries to access the files in either /proc/acpi/ac_adapter, /proc/acpi/battery or /proc/acpi/temperature loops infinitely, but only with the old BIOS. It was amateurishly tried to fix the DSDT, but without success. The new BIOS leads to the following messages by the ACPI subsystem:

The ACPI AML in your computer contains errors, please nag the manufacturer to correct it.
Allowing relaxed access to fields; turn on CONFIG_ACPI_DEBUG for details.

Booting with CONFIG_ACPI_DEBUG enabled was not tried.
The recompilation of the DSDT with iasl, version 20040220, reveals only one syntax error:

dsdt.orig.dsl   2454: If (SS1)
Error   1037 -         ^ syntax error, unexpected PARSEOP_IF

CPUFreq

The module speedstep-centrino should be chosen. Alas, the user-space daemon cpufreqd segfaults and there is an oops in the kernel log:

    ACPI-0292: *** Error: Looking up [ACST] in namespace, AE_ALREADY_EXISTS
    ACPI-1136: *** Error: [NULL NAME], AE_ALREADY_EXISTS
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000010
 printing eip:
c022afa5
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000 [#1]
Modules linked in: speedstep_centrino fan thermal processor battery ac ipw2200 \\
firmware_class ieee80211 ieee80211_crypt yenta_socket pcmcia_core ohci1394     \\
ieee1394 intel_agp agpgart uhci_hcd ohci_hcd ehci_hcd usbcore e100 mii slamr   \\
evdev genrtc nls_iso8859_1 nls_cp437 vfat fat dm_mod 8250 serial_core
CPU:    0
EIP:    0060:[<c022afa5>]    Tainted: P  
EFLAGS: 00010246   (2.6.7-xtops5) 
EIP is at acpi_ps_parse_aml+0xd9/0x1d8
eax: 00000000   ebx: c15fec00   ecx: c032e9c0   edx: 00002ebc
esi: c15fec00   edi: 00000007   ebp: dffcae54   esp: dc675b94
ds: 007b   es: 007b   ss: 0068
Process modprobe (pid: 3015, threadinfo=dc674000 task=dc4ec6b0)
Stack: c144a414 00000000 c15fec00 dffc9494 dffcdf54 c0229e24 c15fec00 c15334d4 
       c15334d4 c041a7b4 c0229e41 00000001 c15334d4 00000000 c0227d1d c15334d4 
       dffcee68 c1533794 dbcb6400 00000000 c0221267 c15334d4 c041a7b4 00000000 
Call Trace:
 [<c0229e24>] acpi_ns_one_complete_parse+0x6c/0x7c
 [<c0229e41>] acpi_ns_parse_table+0xd/0x20
 [<c0227d1d>] acpi_ns_load_table+0x69/0x91
 [<c0221267>] acpi_ex_add_table+0x67/0xa2
 [<c022159c>] acpi_ex_load_op+0x1a7/0x1f6
 [<c0221ecb>] acpi_ex_resolve_to_value+0x3b/0x46
 [<c0224222>] acpi_ex_resolve_operands+0x1dc/0x32e
 [<c0223463>] acpi_ex_opcode_1A_1T_0R+0x22/0x54
 [<c021cc91>] acpi_ds_exec_end_op+0xad/0x268
 [<c022abaa>] acpi_ps_parse_loop+0x557/0x879
 [<c022af1a>] acpi_ps_parse_aml+0x4e/0x1d8
 [<c022b82a>] acpi_psx_execute+0x15a/0x1c0
 [<c0228ac4>] acpi_ns_execute_control_method+0x3b/0x48
 [<c0228a72>] acpi_ns_evaluate_by_handle+0x74/0x8b
 [<c0228971>] acpi_ns_evaluate_relative+0xa9/0xc5
 [<c022822d>] acpi_evaluate_object+0x108/0x1c9
 [<e0f2aa12>] acpi_processor_set_pdc+0x6b/0x6f [processor]
 [<e0f2accc>] acpi_processor_get_performance_info+0x2d/0x72 [processor]
 [<e0f2ad8a>] acpi_processor_register_performance+0x77/0xb5 [processor]
 [<e0f151f0>] centrino_cpu_init_acpi+0x70/0x370 [speedstep_centrino]
 [<c016f121>] d_alloc+0x21/0x180
 [<e0f1556e>] centrino_cpu_init+0x7e/0x170 [speedstep_centrino]
 [<c028a11b>] cpufreq_add_dev+0xdb/0x2b0
 [<c01532b3>] unmap_area_pmd+0x53/0x60
 [<c0153467>] unmap_vm_area+0x37/0x90
 [<c0153782>] __vunmap+0xd2/0x110
 [<c012d173>] mod_sysfs_setup+0x103/0x160
 [<c01537e8>] vfree+0x28/0x40
 [<c012e58d>] load_module+0xa2d/0xb00
 [<c025233e>] sysdev_driver_register+0x8e/0xf0
 [<c028affd>] cpufreq_register_driver+0x6d/0xe0
 [<e0f1d020>] centrino_init+0x20/0x26 [speedstep_centrino]
 [<c012e768>] sys_init_module+0x108/0x1f0
 [<c0106fcd>] sysenter_past_esp+0x52/0x71

Code: 83 78 10 00 75 0e 80 48 09 08 8b 83 b0 01 00 00 c6 40 1c 01 

Hotkeys

There is one hotkey for the WLAN, this key switches the WLAN on and off physically. I doesn't generate key events but the driver is aware of its status.

Sound

Sound works with Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - ALSA driver snd-intel8x0.

Survey PCI Devices

Output from lspci:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82855PM Processor to I/O Controller (rev 21)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82855PM Processor to AGP Controller (rev 21)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 [..]
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 [..]
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 [..]
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB 2.0 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 83)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DBM LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DBM (ICH4) Ultra ATA Storage Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audi[..]
0000:00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]
0000:02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82801BD PRO/100 VE (CNR) Ethernet Controller (rev 83)
0000:02:09.0 Network controller: Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)
0000:02:0a.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c475 (rev b8)
0000:02:0a.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C551 IEEE 1394 Controller

Credits

• Sebastian Henschel