Alright, so I have a Thinkpad T30 - and Ubuntu works awfully nice under it. I did notice, however, that the system would freeze if I hotswapped an optical drive for a battery in the Ultra-bay slot.

There is a module called lt_hotswap that monitors the slot, and sends the eject command to ibm_acpi (I do believe) if the release lever is pulled. It works perfectly fine if I load it when my system is already booted.

I'd really like to have this loaded at boot time though - so I added lt_hotswap to /etc/modules, and the one configuration option it has to /etc/modules.d/options as options lt_hotswap auto_eject=1.

That should load the module on boot, right? And it does.

dmesg | grep hotswap produces


[17179849.068000] Laptop ultrabay hotswap driver version 0.3.6 [17179849.068000] lt_hotswap: '\_SB.PCI0.LPC.EC.BAT1' found (Hot-Swappable) [17179849.068000] lt_hotswap: '\_SB.PCI0.IDE0.SCND.MSTR' found (Hot-Swappable) [17179849.068000] lt_hotswap: '\_SB.PCI0.PCI1.DOCK.IDE1.PRIM.MSTR' found (Non-Swappable) [17179849.068000] lt_hotswap: '\_SB.PCI0.LPC.FDC.FDD0' found (Hot-Swappable) [17179849.068000] lt_hotswap: '\_SB.PCI0.PCI1.DOCK' found (Hot-Swappable)


However, when it boots, /proc/acpi/ibm is entirely missing. The /dev/ files didn't get made, and dmesg | grep ibm produces:


ibm_acpi: IBM ThinkPad ACPI Extras v0.12a ibm_acpi: http://ibm-acpi.sf.net/ ibm_acpi: dock device not present ibm_acpi: acpi_install_notify_handler(bay) failed: 7


I found out that lt_hotswap needs to be loaded after all other ACPI modules are loaded, and I suspect that this is the problem. Any confirmation on that? I've also read that udev does not load modules in any specific order - so is there any way around this other than adding something to xinitrc or bashrc (or wherever would be appropriate) or running a script on login? That seems like an ugly solution to me, but I'll do it if I need to - It does work seamlessly if it's loaded after boot.

Sigh.

Any feedback would be appreciated.
I found out that lt_hotswap needs to be loaded after all other ACPI modules are loaded, and I suspect that this is the problem. Any confirmation on that? I've also read that udev does not load modules in any specific order - so is there any way around this other than adding something to xinitrc or bashrc (or wherever would be appropriate) or running a script on login? That seems like an ugly solution to me, but I'll do it if I need to - It does work seamlessly if it's loaded after boot.

Sigh.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

So what distribution are you running? Fedora/Redhat and derivatives have a rc.local file which is the last script to run prior to log in. If not then you would need to configure a script to run via init.d. s99xxxxx would be the last script to run in a rcx.d. Which rcx.d (runlevel) depends on distro.

I'm running Ubuntu Dapper. . . so, runlevel 6?

Ubuntu is based on debian so I would assume runlevel 2 is default.
FYI:
runlevels
0 (halt the system) standard for all distributions
1 (single-user mode) standard for all distributions
2 through 5 (various multi-user modes) depends on distribution.
6 (reboot the system) standard for all distributions

Ahh, thanks. I haven't done much readup on the rc scripts and how they work (as probably made apparent by my misthinking that the runlevel for reboot was the one for some multi-user mode) - I'm about to though.

Time to go hit up the ubuntu site to see what they have to say about how to customize their rc scripts....

Thanks for the point in the right direction!

This will help.
https://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/09...run-at-bootup/

Sweet - good info, with links to more good info.

Thanks again!

Off to test!

Nice - making a one-line script that loads the module, and then running update-rc.d <scriptname> defaults works fine.

Peter Fruhberger on the linux-thinkpad mailing list says that the following will fix it as well (I haven't tested this yet)