Upower issues with Framework laptops

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
1

Hello Framework Team,

I am experiencing an issue related to battery status reporting on my Framework 16 laptop running Arch Linux. It appears that the laptop is not delivering the correct summarized battery status, which is causing problems with how upower (and potentially other tools) interact with the system. This issue was discussed in this GitLab issue on upower, where it was mentioned that the Framework should provide a summarized battery status when performing certain actions on the battery. Without this, user-facing applications struggle to process battery information correctly.

They have to give us a summarized battery status when they are doing some features on your battery, rather than only charging/discharging when the line power is attached. Otherwise, it confuses the user, and the upper layer applications are difficult to process such kind of battery status information.

Concretely this means that users are getting repetitive (and annoying) “connect” and “disconnect” sounds every few seconds in their desktop environment because the status is constantly cycling between “start charging” and “stop charging”.

Unfortunately I am not an expert on this particular subject but I would like to further debug this issue where possible because the recent release of upower breaks a lot of Framework systems that run Linux. I can imagine that it is in both our best interests to solve this issue for the people that run Linux on their Framework laptops. Please do let me know what I can do to help debug this issue. Please also review all the information that is already given in the Gitlab discussion.

Furthermore, I acknowledge that Archlinux is not officially supported on the framework laptops but upower is also present in Fedora Linux and I suspect users on Fedora will face the same issues when the newest version of upower is released for them.

Details:

  • Operating System: Arch Linux
  • Framework Product: Framework Laptop 16 (AMD 7040 Series)
  • Issue Description: The battery status is not being summarized correctly, leading to confusion with how upower reports the charging/discharging status. This is causing issues with various applications relying on battery status information. As noted in the discussion, a summarized battery status is required to avoid confusion and improve compatibility with power management applications.

Could you kindly investigate this issue and provide a fix or any guidance on how to resolve it?

Additional Resources:

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2

It might be also good to file a report on their github as this seems also be a firmware issue.

3

Thanks, I posted in on their Github as well now.

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4

The problem is upower, not framework laptop. Upower updated recently and make discharging sound like disconnected. Happens in all BIOS versions

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5

Here is good rundown https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/upower/upower/-/issues/306#note_2856003

6

Yes, I wouldn’t blame the firmware here. Even though it possibly may improve the status reporting, it will still remain the same for other vendors.

Having additional info which tells the reason of discharging would be great though, but that translates to completely new interface attribute.

7

The issue has been resolved in upower version 1.90.9.

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8

I can confirm this, I have just installed upower-1.90.9-1.fc41 and no longer have the problem

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