Re: sony-laptop vs sonypi (Re: [PATCH 1/2] Add new sony laptop drivers maintainer)

Stelian Pop
2007-02-10T21:59:51Z

Le vendredi 09 février 2007 à 11:58 -0500, Len Brown a écrit :

> sonypi is an interesting beast, and I do mean beast.
> It pre-dates Linux ACPI support by several years
> and is chock-full of reverse engineered magic numbers.

Yep. It was Andrew Trigdell (with friends) who reverse engineered some
of those magic numbers in the first place, and even I never knew what
were they good for.

[...]

> I think one of the major decisions you need to make going forward
> is if it makes sense to maintain the parts of sonypi
> that are reverse engineered AML -- rather than simply
> running in ACPI mode and invoking the AML in the BIOS.

Personaly I think that running without ACPI today is no longer an
option, especially on laptops. So I would indeed go in this direction.

[...]

> Personally, I think that invoking machine specific AML
> has its risks, but invoking C-ized machine specific AML
> sucked into a platform specific driver borders on the insane.
> (but Linux didn't have ACPI in 2000, so maybe "determined"
> would be a more appropriate word:-)

I'll take that as a compliment then :)

> Stelian,
> I think if you can list what you know actually works on what models,
> and what may not work, and what you think about the code needs to
> be changed, that would help Mattia enormously.

Unfortunately, this is something I always wanted to do and never get
around to. I don't have such a list, I only have a rather big mail
folder containing sony related mail.

I don't remember if I already said this, but I think it would be a good
idea to start a wiki to create some sort of documentation.

> I suggest that the goal might be to have a single consolidated
> sony-laptop driver. Ie. port the working features one by one
> from sonypi into sony-laptop, and when sony-laptop can do everything
> that sonypi can do (though maybe not with the same ioctl interface etc)
> the schedule sonypi for deletion. But in the mean time, on the
> assumption the people actually use sonypi to make their vaio's
> dance in useful ways, I would leave it alone for their benefit.

It seems a reasonable way to pursue.

Thanks,

--
Stelian Pop <stelian@popies.net>

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