Linux on HP Pavilion s7500
September 24th, 2006 by Tvrtko Ursulin
One of my recent acquisitions, bought to replace ThinkPad R40 as a primary home PC, is this cool little desktop from HP. Actual model number in the UK is s7510.uk, while elsewhere it can be also found named as s7000 or s7500.
First of all I must say that it isn’t as quiet as I expected it to be. The fan is always on (although spinning slowly), which might be because HP messed up the ACPI DSDT code, or it may be by design. But having an AMD Turion64 ML-34 inside, I expected it to only spin-up the fan on demand.
Another thing which leads me to believe DSDT is messed up is the temperature reading which is, no matter what you do, always at 40degC.
So I tried to disassemble it and pass it trough Intel IASL compiler. And indeed, there were many errors and warnings. Here you can grab the acpidump output and DSDT code if interested.
Are those problems also responsible for the fact that there are no processor C-states reported by ACPI I do not know. But here is the relevant output:
astrid:/home/tvrtko # cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/info
processor id: 0
acpi id: 0
bus mastering control: yes
power management: no
throttling control: yes
limit interface: yes
astrid:/home/tvrtko # cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/power
active state: C1
max_cstate: C8
bus master activity: 00000000
states:
*C1: type[C1] promotion[--] demotion[--] latency[000] usage[00000000]
And here is the lspci output:
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:12.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 4379 Serial ATA Controller
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 11)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller ATI
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC’97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series]
02:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Agere Systems FW323 (rev 61)
02:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5006X 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
Wireless NIC currently does not work because of an unknown reason. Atheros chipsets should be well supported in general but this one unfortunately isn’t. Here is the link on the issue as reported on madwifi.org.
Everything else works mostly fine under SUSE 10.1 32-bit version. Analog VGA output is remarkably sharp (or is this thanks to Samsung 740T LCD monitor?), it honestly looks like it is hooked up via DVI.
All in all it’s a cute little desktop. If HP could release an updated firmware which would improve the DSDT table it would be perfect. But with the exception of wireless support, it is completely usable as is.