Right now I can't tell exactly what I need, as there is little to no documentation for the various Voodoo power and battery kexts.
What I have today is simple:
VoodooBattery from 1/7/2010 (version 1.0?)
VoodooPower from 5/28/2009 (version "©2008 Superhai")
I'm on Snow Leopard 10.6.2 on an Asus Eee 901, with netkas's vanilla 10.6.2 kernel binpatched to allow it to run on an Atom.
Here is where things get murky, and where the lack of documentation is extremely frustrating. Long ago before the Voodoo kexts, I used Psystar's OpenHaltRestart to allow proper power down and restart. Otherwise the system would finish shutting down, but never hand control back to the BIOS to cut power or reset. I switched to the Voodoo kexts as they were being maintained and provided better battery information than my old solutions.
Today I was trying to move off of the old VoodooPower.kext, as I understand that was designed for Leopard only, and my only hope for having a vaguely supported system would be to move to one of the Snow Leopard kexts. Thus I started experimenting:
- VoodooBattery + VoodooPower + OpenHaltRestart = success
- VoodooBattery + VoodooPower = success
- VoodooBattery + OpenHaltRestart = cannot halt/restart successfully
- VoodooBattery = cannot halt/restart successfully
- VoodooBattery + VoodooPowerMini = kernel panic at boot
- VoodooPowerMini = kernel panic at boot
- VoodooBattery + VoodooPowerAcpi = cannot halt/restart successfully
From this I've determined that:
- OpenHaltRestart is no longer functional, and removed it.
- VoodooBattery is required for any battery support (somewhat obvious).
- VoodooPowerACPI does nothing on my system.
- VoodooPowerMini kernel panics at boot.
- VoodooPower (5/28/2009) is the only one that allows my computer to halt/restart, and it's seemingly no longer supported.
Something in addition to VoodooBattery is required, or my system will not shut down. Whatever this tweak is, it was previously supplied by OpenHaltRestart, and is now supplied only by the obsolete VoodooPower. Vinnie881 reported this same issue weeks ago, and
you ignored him. This is clearly related to VoodooPower.
Things that are not documented and should be:
- Version numbers! Why do none of these extensions have any concept of version numbers to distinguish them? Seriously.
- What kernel extensions are these kexts dependent on? I'm wagering that the kernel panic with VoodooPowerMini is due to missing dependencies. Of course, the extension should be declaring these and not loading rather than crashing...
- What chunk of code is it that allows many of these systems to halt/restart properly, and what current extension will provide it? OpenHaltRestart did, and the old VoodooPower did. As far as I can tell, the new kexts do not.
- Should VoodooBattery be used along with VoodooPowerMini or VoodooPowerACPI? Are some of these mutually exclusive, subsets of each other, etc? There's no guidance on what to use when and where. None.
- Where is VoodooPower for Snow Leopard? Obviously there's something it does that is crucial that's not being done by other kexts.