(not so) smart battery manager
Today my mac hung when it ran out of battery. Well, it not actually hung in the sense freeze, rather the applications refused to work. I could switch between apps, some worked, but some showed me the spinning beachball of death. The symptoms where just as if you leave the network without unmounting a network volume.
After a while of patient waiting, I force-quitted most of the apps, but I had to use the power switch to really finish it...
kernel[0]: SmartBatteryManager: retrying command 0x0f; retry due to absurd value _zero_
Sure, my battery showed to be empty, but still the computer worked. The sensors reported a completely empty battery: a condition under which the computer normally wouldn't work anymore. Probably the software ran into a never-meant-to-reach bit of code.
Suprisingly I found myself to be (according to google) the first person to have noticed this problem.
Comments
Well, my MacBook gave me this today (printed once every second):
kernel[0]: SmartBatteryManager Error: Capacity Read Zero (15)
Not as funny as "absurd value" but just as worrying. :/
Posted by: Ignacio :: 28.04.07 22:44
Yeah, me too I've already seen this error. To be precise, it happened just yesterday:
Apr 28 21:49:02 kernel[0]: SmartBatteryManager Error: Capacity Read Zero (15)
But at least this error won't lock You out of Your computer since it doesn't use all the resources of Your machine just to write the log files!
On my machine it seems the read-zero-error even occurs regularly, but google doesn't show a lot of hits:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Capacity+Read+Zero%22
Let's hope this bug will be fixed with tonight's battery firmware update...
Posted by: Damian :: 29.04.07 13:14
I got the Capacity Read Zero too. The problem is that since day my laptop doesn't boot anymore: no display, no hard disk noise, nothing.
I've recovered the system.log from the hard drive, so I guess that can be related
Posted by: koke :: 9.05.07 17:00