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Re: can someone clarify debian 13 battery thresholds for me?

On Mon, 1 Dec 2025, Qingwei Zhang via linux wrote:

>
> Hi rday,
>
> Your understanding of the start/end thresholds is correct — the
> battery should start charging at 75% and stop at 80%. If your Dell
> laptop keeps charging past 80%, it usually means the firmware/EC
> does not actually support Linux-controlled charge thresholds, even
> though the sysfs files exist.
>
> On many Dell models, the kernel exposes charge_control_*_threshold,
> but the hardware ignores them unless the feature is supported by the
> Dell WMI battery driver or configured directly in BIOS.
>
> A few quick checks:
>
> lsmod | grep dell
> modprobe dell-wmi-battery   # if supported
>
> If dell-wmi-battery is missing (common), Linux cannot enforce
> thresholds. In that case, charging limits must be set in the BIOS
> (“Custom Charge”) if available — otherwise they cannot be
> controlled.
>
> In short: the sysfs interface is present, but your firmware isn’t
> honoring it.

  it appears that, no, that specific module is not on my system:

/lib/modules$ find . -name dell-wmi*
./6.12.43+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-sysman
./6.12.43+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-sysman/dell-wmi-sysman.ko.xz
./6.12.43+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi.ko.xz
./6.12.43+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-led.ko.xz
./6.12.43+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-ddv.ko.xz
./6.12.43+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-descriptor.ko.xz
./6.12.43+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-aio.ko.xz
./6.12.57+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-sysman
./6.12.57+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-sysman/dell-wmi-sysman.ko.xz
./6.12.57+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi.ko.xz
./6.12.57+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-led.ko.xz
./6.12.57+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-ddv.ko.xz
./6.12.57+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-descriptor.ko.xz
./6.12.57+deb13-amd64/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/dell/dell-wmi-aio.ko.xz

  so that explains it, thanks.

rday