2009-11-16

Thinkpad+T500+F12

Ok interesting development with laptop and issues from earlier blog post. Most of the travails in the last week may have been due to Kernel issues and weird ACPI mappings from the BIOS. In following up on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=522201 it was asked to see if changing the iommu mapping from hardware to software would make some problems go away.

I made the changes to grub.conf and rebooted the system.
  1. System booted into 1680x1050 while plugged into docking station without any fiddling. (VGA out is still off but thats ok...)
  2. Sound is working better. I thought I was dealing with some pulseaudio issues (hey its what everyone blames isn't it?) but it turns out that it might have been something else.
  3. The new disk drive seems to be happier, I was worried last night when I heard it making some 'clicking' noises again.
  4. No more DMAR messages in dmesg... I am wondering if the DMAR messages mapped to the disk drive or something else.
So not sure what the long term fix will be, but it looks like I have a good work-around (using the age-old definition of if things are working great for 20 minutes... ship it!)

2 comments:

Jonathan Pritchard said...

What was the sound issue you were experiencing on your T500? Does your sound fade out to nothing at around 60% on the volume slider?

Thanks.

Stephen Smoogen said...

That was one of them. Another was that sound just didn't work at all after a bit if I was switching sound between say flash, rhythmbox etc. I had that this morning and noticed that whenever I was trying to start sound I got a DRD in my dmesg.. so far so good.