Re: experimental patch for toshiba_acpi

[John Belmonte <john@neggie.net>]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 04:18:25PM +0000, Jonathan Buzzard wrote:
>
>> Because it makes far more sense to have a user mode program to drive the
>> features, and for the kernel to provide the necessary thin layer to
>> access the features.
>
> It makes sense for the kernel to provide a consistent abstraction of
> hardware functionality where possible. Almost every kernel driver could
> be rewritten in userspace - that doesn't make it a good idea.

That argument would be most applicable if we were talking about adding
some new /dev interface-- but we're not.  Toshiba's HCI has been
around for a couple of decades; /dev/toshiba, which exposes it, has
been around for over 10 years; toshset, a useful and popular tool
which depends on /dev/toshiba, nearly as long as /dev/toshiba.

The proposed patch makes /dev/toshiba, and hence toshset, work on more
laptops-- it's a no-brainer to anyone with a practical mindset.
You've got Jonathan and Charles-- the two most-knowledgeable people on
Toshiba's firmware and /dev/toshiba in the free software community--
saying that it's not practical to jam all that functionality into the
kernel.  Please listen to them.

Regards,
--John