Bug 476369

Summary:	Power Devil Restart Loop
Product:	[Plasma] Powerdevil	Reporter:	Altamush Nayyer Khan <theattish>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	major	CC:	contact+bugs.kde.org, me, natalie_clarius, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version:	5.27.9
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Arch Linux
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Altamush Nayyer Khan 2023-10-31 13:53:22 UTC

SUMMARY
***
Powerdevil updated to 5.27.9-2 with ddcutil to 2.0.0-1. Update was 2 days ago. The Power module is broken every since. Using journalctl I got the following for you.

"org.kde.powerdevil: org.kde.powerdevil.chargethresholdhelper.getthreshold failed “Charge thresholds are not supported by the kernel for this hardware”
Oct 30 10:51:46 attish-archLinux org_kde_powerdevil[3705]: org.kde.powerdevil: org.kde.powerdevil.backlighthelper.brightness failed
Oct 30 10:51:51 attish-archLinux systemd[901]: plasma-powerdevil.service: start operation timed out. Terminating.
Oct 30 10:51:51 attish-archLinux systemd[901]: plasma-powerdevil.service: Failed with result ‘timeout’.
Oct 30 10:51:51 attish-archLinux systemd[901]: plasma-powerdevil.service: Consumed 1.745s CPU time.
Oct 30 10:51:51 attish-archLinux systemd[901]: plasma-powerdevil.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 46."

This restart loop never ends. Downgrading to previous versions work. After downgrade, this is what pacman spits out after using pacman -Syu so you know which version I am using currently.

warning: ddcutil: ignoring package upgrade (1.4.1-1 => 2.0.0-1)
warning: powerdevil: ignoring package upgrade (5.27.8-2 => 5.27.9-2)
***

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Upgrade ddcutil and powerdevil to the versions that I have stated above.

OBSERVED RESULT
The power devil service always crashes and tries to restart itself and whenever it does, it freezes the computer for a second. Restart loop causes this every 5 or so seconds.

EXPECTED RESULT
The power devil module and service should work fine after update and the power module should be loaded in System Settings

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Windows:
macOS:
Linux/KDE Plasma:
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.9
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.111.0
Qt Version: 5.15.11

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
In order to make it work I have to use the following commands:

killall org_kde_powerdevil

kstart5 /usr/lib/org_kde_powerdevil

It spits out:

org.kde.powerdevil: org.kde.powerdevil.chargethresholdhelper.getthreshold failed “Charge thresholds are not supported by the kernel for this hardware”
org.kde.powerdevil: org.kde.powerdevil.backlighthelper.brightness failed
org.kde.powerdevil: Handle button events action could not check for screen configuration
org.kde.powerdevil: org.kde.powerdevil.chargethresholdhelper.getthreshold failed “Charge thresholds are not supported by the kernel for this hardware”

The restart loop breaks this way.

Comment 1 Justin Shepherd 2023-11-01 16:30:38 UTC

Similar to bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476375

I had to downgrade both ddcutil and powerdevil to get it to work again. The last known working combination is:

ddcutil-1.4.1-1 (downgraded from ddcutil-2.0.0-1)
powerdevil-5.27.9-1 (downgraded from powerdevil-5.27.9-2)

sudo pacman -U https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/d/ddcutil/ddcutil-1.4.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/p/powerdevil/powerdevil-5.27.9-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Comment 2 Nate Graham 2023-11-01 20:25:02 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 476375 ***