Bjorn Helgaas writes:
On Monday 05 October 2009 09:56:51 am Stefan Bader wrote:
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
...
>
> 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.
I understand the motivation for the current patch, and I'm not asking
about it in particular. My concern is about the underlying structure
of the driver.
I'm just asking why we would want a driver that requires an update
for every new machine. That sort of ongoing maintenance is a good
sign that we're doing something wrong.
Hi Bjorn,
as Stefan already mentioned, is the driver only targeting a very small set
of (very popular) netbooks. The vendor supposed to control the fan only by
BIOS. I think it is not ment to be controlled by the OS at all, as there is
no official Windows support neither.
The successor series of the supported netbooks even don't have the
register in EC anymore. So I think there won't be much changes caused by new
devices in the future anymore. Besides that, I don't think there's a way to
detect the right register and the needed values automatically…
kind regards,
--peter
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