Re: [PATCH 2/2] ACPI Check for backlight support via ACPI video.ko otherwise use vendor ACPI drivers

Matthew Garrett
2008-07-10T12:58:48Z

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 02:48:12PM +0200, Thomas Renninger wrote:
> On Thursday 10 July 2008 14:24:54 Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 02:19:04PM +0200, Thomas Renninger wrote:
> > > Yes, I agree.
> > > Anyway, given the fact that video.ko was rather broken all the time, a
> > > reasonable solution for now is to exclude Dells from using it.
> >
> > No, the problem was that the backlight was simultaneously being altered
> > by two pieces of code. kpowersave is doing the backlight control via hal
> > (I assume), and hal should simply not provide the Dell backlight control
> > on systems that have ACPI video backlight control. There's no need to
> > have this policy in the kernel.
> Do you know Dells working with the video.ko driver?

Presumably the Inspiron 640M, since otherwise there's no way that that
bug could trigger.

> If you tell me video.ko, best with an IGD device and without one is working
> there, it can be removed. Even then talking with dcdbas developers how to
> inform their user space app first is a good idea.

The userspace app that needs fixing is hal. I'm already working on that.

> As Dell is cooking their own soup here and the dcdbas driver was reported to
> work correctly with ACPI brightness functions in BIOS it is ok to blacklist
> Dells here until the first test reports are coming in telling us that
> video.ko is actually working correctly there.
> Testing will be easy via boot param.

No, really, let's just fix the problem properly.

> I will not risk again that this whole bunch of our patches will be reverted
> on -rc6 again, because a Dell user is reporting a backlight regression.
> We then have the same situation we had when the "check for physical device was
> removed": The implementation is wrong but worked. The implementation is
> right, but does not work on a specific machine -> regression -> revert.

I've no idea at all why you think this is a kernel issue.