The latest 2.6.25.x Fedora 8 kernels have both ACPI_PROCFS_POWER and ACPI_SYSFS_POWER turned on and this can cause a strange problem with HAL which results in it incorrectly displaying the same battery twice and reporting incorrect charge levels for the “bogus” battery. This in turn creates problems with power management software such as kpowersave and gnome-power-manager.
I have only seen this reported on some specific x86_64 machines but it may affect other architectures too.
The problem has been reported (and fixed) in many other distros and the patch to fix it has been in circulation since January. The patch was even created by someone at RedHat so it’s slightly annoying that it hasn’t made it yet into the Fedora versions of HAL. I can only assume it is an oversight by the HAL development team or the package maintainers. However, at the very least, a response to the bug report would have been welcome.
The RedHat bug report can be found here (Bug #452356) and contains links to various other reports which contain plenty more information.
For anyone suffering from the same problem and impatient for a fix I’ve created a set of RPMs that include the patch. You can find them over at my Fedora 8 page.
Hope this is useful to someone. Usual disclaimers apply: if it breaks your machine then its not my fault.