Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
On Monday 05 October 2009 06:05:54 am Stefan Bader wrote:
<stefan.bader@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I search my acerhdf-inbox for the people who sent me the BIOS
versions,
maybe they still have the netbook and can me send the modalias
content. I'll
hopefully find some time upcoming weekend.
But, can't we simply assume, following dmi lines?
MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:*Acer*:*AOA*:");
MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:*Gateway*:*AOA*:");
MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:*Packard Bell*:*AOA*:");
MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:*Packard Bell*:*DOA*:");
We have exactly those constellations within the BIOS settings
table. If I
interpret the modalias line correctly, "pnAOA110" means "Product Name
AOA110" and that's what we have already in the BIOS settings
table. So I
think we do already have all information we need to create a
complete patch
for the problem, or am I wrong?
Right pn means that. I would strongly believe the above changes
should be
good. I sometimes tend to be over-cautious. Attaching a refreshed
patch
which includes them all.
Well, acerhdf.c and dmi-id.c both do
dmi_get_system_info(DMI_PRODUCT_NAME) when querying product name which
means that the product names in the acerhdf table and the dmi-id ones
are actually one and the same thing.
This smells like a maintenance problem. The driver only works on the
specific machines and BIOS versions compiled into it. That means you
have to update the driver every time a new machine comes out. A major
goal of ACPI is to avoid stuff like that.
Are you sure there's no way to make this driver work in a generic way,
e.g., by claiming an ACPI device?
The driver is currently only targeted at a small set of netbooks and even there
some registers have changed between sub models or bios versions.
The functions are implemented by poking and reading bits from the EC. No acpi
interface to which one relate as far as I know. Maybe wmi, but from the
experiences with acer-wmi, I doubt anything works. At least acer-wmi now
explicitly blacklist these models for uselessness.
So the driver performs very strict bios version checks and every unknown
version get a big warning printed. Which you do not want to be issued on every
hardware of one of these vendors. Which happens with the driver as it is now.
-Stefan
I can't believe that Windows would tolerate a solution like this,
although I guess maybe people are using to having to install Windows,
then install random OEM-specific junk on top to get full functionality,
and OEMs can probably do whatever ugly things they want there.
Or is this another case of "the OS is supposed to use WMI to do this,
and no, you can't have the WMI information"?
Bjorn
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