Re: Turning off camera also kills card reader on EeePC 900

[Sitsofe Wheeler <sitsofe@yahoo.com>]

Alan Jenkins wrote:
> Ok.  So the platform driver settings do match those in the BIOS.  My
> guess would be the platform driver is fine and the BIOS screws up.

I was afraid you were going to say that.

> The "HC died" message is interesting.  Sounds like the controller for
> these two USB devices stops working.  Maybe try unloading and reloading
> the ehci module?  I don't think I can help any more though.

I compiled the kernel without module support so unless there's some 
sysfs trick that can be done...

> - Are any BIOS upgrades available?  None of them mention this problem,
> but the descriptions often miss out details. [1][2]

For some reason I thought I had once seen an 804 BIOS but I only see 802 
on the EeePC 900 page (link below) and the even older 704 BIOS on 
ftp://ftp.asus.com/pub/ASUS/EeePC/EeePC900/ .

> - It might be necessary to compare with the pre-installed OS
>  - Is the pre-installed kernel any better (files might be under
> /proc/acpi/asus instead)?  I guess you might not have the time or
> resources to test that though.

The Xandros 2.6.21.4-eeepc install has the following files in 
/proc/acpi/asus/
brn camera cardr cpufv disp hdps init type wlan

I have no idea what cpufv, disp, hdps, init or type are. Doing echo 1 > 
camera && echo 0 > camera under this setup does NOT disappear the SD 
card. Additionally brn seems to really represent the current LCD 
brightness (whereas it does not on a stock kernel and seems to always be 
set to -19) and the hotkeys (e.g. for brightness) seem to respond far 
more quickly than the stock kernel too.

>  - The source code is... a 2Gb+ rar file someone would have to download
> and pick apart.

2.6Gbytes of multipart RAR. Joy.

 > [1] Asus downloads <http://eeepc.asus.com/global/download.htm>

This link seems to be for the 701 only.

Does anyone know if the archives on
http://support.asus.com/download/download_item_4.aspx?product=20&model=Eee%20PC%20900/Linux&SLanguage=en-us&os=5 
(release dates appear to be 5th September 2008) are actually any different?

(A brief aside. If you are a company doing seeking to do a source 
release of a Linux distribution, it might be a good idea to go for 
typical Unix formats. It is easier for folks if you package things as 
tar.bz2 or tar.gz files or even .zip rather than going for .rar . 
Additionally it is helpful if you split the just the kernel into an 
archive of its own).

--
Sitsofe