Dell Laptop Stuck at 800 MHz - Linux Fix

I’ve got a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop is which is only 2 years old. It started running extraordinarily slowly, and the CPU governer wouldn’t scale above 800 MHz. At first I thought this was down to the operating system. In Ubuntu 10.10, a quick cpufreq-info revealed the some strange limits:

current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 800 MHz. The
governor "performance" may decide which speed to use within this range.

On the next reboot the dreaded message came up:

The AC power adapter type cannot be determined. Your system will operate
slower and the battery will not charge. Please connect a Dell 90 W AC
adapter or higher for best system operation.

Dell place a chip in their adapters which force you to use theirs and no one else. They say this is to “protect the battery” and identify the wattage of the adapter. There’s nothing wrong with my adapter, yet I now cannot charge the battery, and my system is stuck at 800 MHz. Communication with this chip is through a one wire protocol, that’s what that mysterious centre pin inside the AC jack is for. The 5 secondish wait on the BIOS page when the adapter is plugged in suggests there’s no life in the chip. To make sure, I tested the adapter with another working Dell Inspiron.

The author of the fix identifies themselves as “Ambasta”, and I can’t thank them enough! Head over to their site to see their fix: Bypassing the DELL unrecognized adapter issue. I’ve posted it again with slightly more detail below for Ubuntu (the Windows one is on their site).

The Fix - Force the Kernel to Ignore BIOS

Note that This only sorts out the CPU issue, not the battery charging. I haven’t found a solution to that so far, and its unlikely that there will be one to be honest. Apart from getting an external battery charger.

The Dell BIOS doesn’t enforce the limit on the CPU, but rather “forcefully suggests” that the kernel stick to the BIOS suggested limit (as found in /proc/acpi/processor/CPUx/bios_limit). When an AC adapter is unrecognised, Dell’s BIOS asks the kernel to stop the CPU being scaled above its lowest setting. Thankfully, there is a way to override this faithfulness: pass processor.ignore_ppc=1 as a kernel parameter!

GRUB 2 - Ubuntu 9.10 and Above

Edit the following file: /etc/default/grub

On about the 9th line down, you’ll see a line that says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash". This appends whatever you provide to the end of each Linux entry in the boot menu. Add the kernel parameter from before to the end of this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash processor.ignore_ppc=1"

Don’t forget to update GRUB and reboot: sudo update-grub && sudo reboot

GRUB 1 - Ubuntu 9.04 and Below

There is a good article at grumpymole on changing GRUB 1 kernel parameters. That article is much more in detail for those still with older versions.