Re: wistron_btns - Is polling always required?

[Carlos Corbacho <cathectic@gmail.com>]

On Friday 27 July 2007 14:07:25 Éric Piel wrote:
> [Ah! I hadn't realized that Carlos and Cathectic were the same person
> ;-) So _you_ are writing acer_acpi :-) ]

[Yes (I really don't like Google obfuscating my name with my user name - I'm 
quite happy for people to know who I really am).]

> So there might be some laptop which do report keys directly via atkbd
> but do not have the ACPI interface to control the led/wireless? 

Yes. AFAIK, it seems the "newer" Acer laptops (2006 and newer) do all come 
with a useable ACPI interface (at least, no one has reported to me one that 
doesn't). The 2004 to 2005 are hit and miss. I don't know of any Acer laptop 
before 2004 that could be supported by acer_acpi (which in turn tend to be 
the ones more likely to require wistron_btns anyway).

> What a 
> mess... Well, then this solution of keeping the support in wistron_btns
> is necessary.

For enabling the hardware on many of these laptops, yes.

> BTW, do you know you'll find plenty of acer DSDTs at this address:
> http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/view.php?manufacturer=ACER . At least,
> there is 3020 and 2410 that you are looking for :-)

I've mostly found that a bit of a pain to sift through (since I really want 
the original DSDTs, not the user modified ones, and not everyone submits 
their originals, or marks properly which one they uploaded. Although I will 
get around to poking about there and update acer_acpi's supported hardware 
list soon).

> Well, let's just remove the key part for every hardware which does
> report keys via atkbd. Once acer_acpi is merged we can also drop
> completely the laptops which it supports. It doesn't really matter much
> if x86 has slightly more hardware support than x86-64.

Agreed.

> One very nice thing would be to agree on a common interface to control
> the wireless interfaces between wistron_btns and acer_acpi (IIRC, led
> interface is already mostly identical). So that users don't have the
> interface changing depending on which acer laptop or which driver they
> are using. That's basically two files called wifi and bluetooth, taking
> 1 for activation and 0 for deactivation. Anyone can suggest a good path
> to put them in? (It will be /sys/... definitely as nothing should be
> added to /proc anymore)
>
> /sys/devices/platform/acer/ ?

That sounds fine - my original upstream proposal for acer_acpi had something 
like that:

1) /sys/devices/platform/acer_acpi for wireless and bluetooth
2) Register Mail LED with LED subsystem

(I experimented with rfkill for wireless and bluetooth, but I didn't like the 
results - I ended up with devices named 'rfkill0', 'rfkill1', etc, which 
wasn't very helpful).

-Carlos
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