Power management (EC?) issues after installing Debian 12

Hardware Librem 14
1

Hey folks!

I’ve recently installed Debian 12 on my Librem 14, replacing the original PureOS installation. Most things are working fine, but I’m experiencing a few issues related to power management. I’m sort of guessing they’re related to the EC firmware because upgrading that solved power management issues in the past, but I could be wrong.

  • Plugging in headphones when the laptop is on battery power sometimes causes a hard shutdown.
    • I could have sworn that I fixed this in the past by upgrading the EC firmware, but I verified using the steps at Librem-EC on Purism Devices – Purism that the OS reinstall did not affect the EC firmware, it’s still at version 1.13.
  • The “start charge threshold” and “end charge threshold” settings in librem-control are not being respected.
    • I previously installed librem-control on the PureOS installation and set the thresholds to 60% and 80% respectively. That was working fine.
    • Now, on the Debian installation, librem-control is not available directly in the package repos, so I downloaded it from here. However, while it runs, it doesn’t seem to have any effect, e.g. I changed the thresholds to 90% and 100% but it’s still the old thresholds (60% and 80%) which are being respected.
  • The keyboard shortcuts to change brightness stop working after a while (fixed temporarily by a reboot). sudo light -S N still works, so I suppose this could be an unrelated software issue.

Any suggestions for how to resolve or further diagnose these issues?

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Doe any of these issues occur with PureOS?

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No, these issues are all new since installing Debian.

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Debian 13 “trixie” was recently released as the new stable, have you tried that yet?

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I have not tried Debian 13 yet; I usually wait a few dot releases before upgrading to give some time for bugs to be flushed out.

That said, my sense is the issue is not likely to be related to my Debian version being too old. The previous installation, PureOS 10, was itself based on Debian 11. Rather, I suspect it may be some configuration or additional software package (beyond librem-control) that was present in PureOS that’s not present in Debian, and would love to discover what.

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searching librem-related packages for PureOS with synaptic I found a package specifically for the Librem 14’s EC ACPI, you may want to check if you have it installed (probably not with Debian 12 if you had not installed it manually)
librem-ec-acpi-dkms (dkms driver sources for EC ACPI in Purism Librem devices)
The driver librem_ec_acpi provides Linux kernel support for the ACPI embedded controller of the following devices:

  • Purism Librem 14 laptop

Maybe will improve things - didn’t test because I don’t have this laptop model

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Thanks, I think this might be it! At least, installing this seems to have solved the second issue (librem-control’s charge thresholds not being respected).

I’ll report back on whether the remaining issues are resolved by this as well.

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Unfortunately, the first issue (plugging in headphones when the laptop is on battery power sometimes causes a hard shutdown) still occurs with librem-ec-acpi-dkms installed.

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On the bright side, the third issue (keyboard shortcuts to change brightness stop working after a while) has not recurred thus far.

2/3 issues fixed is not bad :laughing:

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You should probably be asking Purism Support about that. Sounds likely to be software or firmware.

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