Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

I'm at the Ohio Linux Fest, and I'm using my EeePC 901 as a charger for my Blackberry (8703e). But, I was finding that it was getting of toasty and noisy.

Had noticed the CPU graph in gkrellm was pegged. So, I started looking to see what was the cause.

udevd was consuming all the CPU....that didn't seem right, but after doing some reboots and experimentation....I found that it was caused by plugging my Blackberry in. It would continue to consume the CPU after the Blackberry was unplugged. So, a reboot was necessary to get things happy again. I had tried restarting udevd, but that seemed to cause other problems (probably loss of state information for other devices in the Eee?)

So much for using the EeePC as my mobile/travel charger for my Blackberry (and work phone).

But, this morning I did a more extensive google search and eventually found mention that disabling the berry_charge kernel module would "fix" the problem. So, after locating the module at

/lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc/kernel/drivers/usb/misc/berry_charge.ko

and renaming it (to disable it). I rebooted and tried plugging in my Blackberry.

That seems to have fixed it. My Blackberry is charging, and the CPU graph looks good on my EeePC. The work phone, Motorola KRZR, doesn't show this issue with charging from my EeePC.

Follow up:

Now off to kill some time before free breakfast and the check-in to the OLF and figure out what I'm doing to get my money's worth (since I have no use for the free drink tickets I get....)