Linux wake alarm on Pavilion DV 7

[cactus-online]

The HP Pavilion dv7-1160eg Entertainment Notebook run good with Linux. Using as an HTPC fails, because there is no way for wake up from alarm time event to start the notebook for scheduled recordings.

But it is possible with Windows. That's a pitty.

There is a prgrammt called nvram-wakeup, which could help. But this programm needs information about the BIOS NVRAM cells which storing the wake up alarm information.

Who can give me a hint for getting these information ?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Share with us your Linus distribution.

You could see if the windows nv-ram wake up program will work with wine.

Otherwise you may need to live without this feature if you want to run Linux.

SEP

[cactus-online]

Hi,

it doesn't depend one the distribution. But for you ;-): it's Ubuntu 9.10.

Access to the hardware with wine ? No no.

The program will work fine, if I know the BIOS CMOS addresses for wake alarm day, hour, minute, second, month.

Someone at HP must have these information.

I believe, that would be a nice support for linux users, giving this information to the linux community.

[Matti_Kurkela]

You probably already have several hints and tools for discovering the necessary NVRAM information, you just haven't noticed them.

Almost every software package you install using the package management tools will contain some documentation files. These files will be installed to directory /usr/share/doc/.

This is true with nvram-wakeup too.

In particular, you'll want to read a file named "README.mb" in that directory. It may be compressed with gzip, as "README.mb.gz".

In it, you will find:

1.) an address of a web site used to collect the NVRAM information for nvram-wakeup.
But unfortunately it looks like nobody has found the necessary information yet. Read on...

2.) that there are tools, named "guess-helper" and "guess" which can be used to find out the correct NVRAM addresses.

3.) the procedure to use with these tools.
The procedure assumes the wake-up time can be adjusted in the BIOS menus. If that is not true, but you can dual-boot to Windows, whenever the procedure says "Go to your BIOS and set...", instead boot to Windows and use the Windows tool to set the wake-up time to the requested value.

If you check out what files the "nvram-wakeup" package installed to your system (e.g. with the command "dlocate -L nvram-wakeup"), you'll find that the guess-helper, the guess utility and all the other tools mentioned in the procedure are already installed in your system, ready to be used.

The procedure to discover the correct NVRAM locations will require several reboots and some careful work. Good luck!

MK

[cactus-online]

I did the proceedure which you described before, before I was writing this post, because it had no success.

The guess-helper script doesn't recognize anything.

Maybe my fault was use of the windows vista task manager. But all other programms I found need information, where the BIOS NVRAM store the data for hour, minute, second, day, month, ... . How do Windows knows this information ?

Is there a spec, for the BIOSs ? Is HP reading this forum and could help ?

[Matti_Kurkela]

Interesting. The fact that Windows can do it with no special tools suggests that setting the wake-up time has been included in some specification... perhaps ACPI?

I googled with "acpi wake-up" and the very first hit looks promising:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ACPI_Wakeup

In a nutshell: if /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm exists on your system, you might be able to use it to set the system wake-up time directly, with no need to fiddle with nvram-wakeup at all.

MK

[cactus-online]

It is only possible to set wake-up hour, minute and second. No day, no month. This is done by using, eg.

root@elefant:/etc/default# echo 0 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
root@elefant:/etc/default# echo `date '+%s' -d "26 May 2010 20:00:00"` > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
root@elefant:/etc/default# cat /proc/driver/rtc
rtc_time : 00:55:14
rtc_date : 2010-05-26
alrm_time : 18:00:00
alrm_date : 2010-05-26
alarm_IRQ : yes
alrm_pending : no
24hr : yes
periodic_IRQ : no
update_IRQ : no
HPET_emulated : no
DST_enable : no
periodic_freq : 1024
batt_status : okay

Setting a day in future more than an day, like

root@elefant:/etc/default# echo 0 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
root@elefant:/etc/default# echo `date '+%s' -d "27 May 2010 20:00:00"` > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
root@elefant:/etc/default# cat /proc/driver/rtc
rtc_time : 00:56:02
rtc_date : 2010-05-26
alrm_time : 18:00:00
alrm_date : 2010-05-26
alarm_IRQ : yes
alrm_pending : no
24hr : yes
periodic_IRQ : no
update_IRQ : no
HPET_emulated : no
DST_enable : no
periodic_freq : 1024
batt_status : okay

doesn't change anything. The alarm day isn't changed. Because of this, i'm searching for an other way. nvram-wakeup could be a way, if someone know about the NVRAM and give it to me.

[Matti_Kurkela]

If ACPI does not do what you need and the guess utilities cannot find the values in the NVRAM, then the values might be stored somewhere else, or stored in a form that is not immediately obvious.

To get the information you need, you would need someone from the Pavilion DV 7 design team, and/or someone who wrote the BIOS for it.

Unfortunately, the BIOS may be bought from another company (Phoenix Technologies used to write a lot of BIOSes for quite a lot of laptop brands), and people like this must usually sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement for their work, so the technical people can't just tell you the details you need.

In principle, you would have to convince someone at HP who has the authority to release that information for you. People with that kind of authority are unlikely to spend a lot of time reading technical forums.

MK