[UPower] ThinkPad goes off during recalibration of battery

[Derriell]

[x] I've read and accepted the Bug Reporting Howto
[x] I've provided all required tlp-stat outputs via Gist (see below)

Describe the bug

I wanted to recalibrate the battery of my ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD for the first time which I have done before with other Thinkpads. I put the recalibrate command sudo tlp recalibrate in the terminal. The problem is that when going back to the device after many hours the device was off. My suspicion is that at 0% battery the device goes off because it does not get power or some other reason. I checked the discharging during the process multiple times and it worked. During discharging the screen went off and I had to reenter my user password after some time. The discharging power was really low at around 3000-3500mw. I assume the device was on all the time during discharging. The The P14s Gen5 AMD has only one battery.
I have not tested what happens around 0% while actively using the device.

Expected behavior

After giving the recalibration command the battery should discharge to 0% and charge to 100% while running the OS. The device should not go off by itself.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the unexpected behavior:

1. Get a P14s Gen 5 AMD
2. Install CachyOS with tlp
3. Run sudo tlp recalibrate
4. Gist tlp-stat

Additional context

CachyOS and BIOS are up to date

[Derriell]

I just read this post #853 (comment) and it has to do with upowerd and Arch based distros.

[linrunner]

Thanks for reporting. I'll leave this open so that affected users have a point of information.

1. The issue with UPower
upower automatically shuts down a laptop at 2% charge (in the default configuration) to prevent data corruption.

Unfortunately, newer versions of UPower do this even when the power adapter is connected. As soon as the controlled discharge by tlp discharge or tlp recalibrate reaches 2%, the CriticalPowerAction takes effect and the system shuts down.

2. Affected UPower versions: 1.90.9, 1.90.10, 1.91.0 (probably also some older ones)
If you're affected, please post the output of upower ---version here.

3. Workaround
Either systemctl mask --now upower.service only during the recalibration
or disable the corresponding action in /etc/UPower/UPower.conf:

AllowRiskyCriticalPowerAction=true
CriticalPowerAction=Ignore

and restart upower.service. With the latter approach, it should be noted that the device will not shut down during normal battery operation.

4. Is there already a permanent solution?
The issue has been reported and the fix merged. However, no UPower version with the fix has been released yet.

[Derriell]

Thank you very much.

My upower --version output is:

UPower client version 1.91.0
UPower daemon version 1.91.0

[Derriell]

I've tested both workarounds and both failed on my device with an up to date CachyOS.

1. I did sudo systemctl stop upower.service before starting the calibration and it still shut down at 2%.

2. I put the parameter in /etc/UPower/UPower.conf to CriticalPowerAction=Ignore , restarted the laptop and ran the recalibration and it still shut down at 2%.

Any ideas what I might do wrong or whats going on?

[linrunner]

@Derriell

1. Do not only stop but also sudo systemctl mask upower.service
2. Try to add AllowRiskyCriticalPowerAction=true to UPower.conf.

[Derriell]

Short update:

With the parameters AllowRiskyCriticalPowerAction=true and CriticalPowerAction=Ignore in UPower.conf the calibration worked.

Method 1 I want to test later.

[linrunner]

@Derriell thanks for the confirmation.