Pavel,
Matthew has shown up on the libsmbios-devel mailing list. I sent
all the
info needed to do a test of Dell LCD brightness control. The main thing
left
would be to make one utility out of the current separate, unsupported,
test
utils.
As for fixing i8k, I don't have the slightest clue where to
begin. You
either have to split initialization with userspace to parse and send in
the
correct io/magic ports to do SMI, or you have to put Dell-specific SMI
token
parsing in the kernel.
If somebody wants to discuss the design, I can definetly
discuss. I
even have a _very_ rough mockup of userspace code to do this. Did not
take
it further because I don't know enough about lmsensors or how to fix
i8k.
--
Michael
PS> sorry for top-posting, my non-broken email client at home for some
reason
could not see your msg, so I could not reply from there.
-----Original Message-----
From: Pavel Machek [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2006 11:26 AM
To: Brown, Michael E
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; Domsch, Matt;
[email protected]
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RESEND] Add Dell laptop backlight brightness
display
Hi!
> You can get and set laptop brighness on Dell with the proper SMI call.
>
> To do the proper SMI call requires parsing SMBIOS structure 0xDA, a
> vendor-proprietary structure, and getting the SMI index and io port
> and magic values. Then, you need to know how to setup the registers
> and input/output buffers for the call. All of this is already present
> in libsmbios.
Perhaps authors of libsmbios could help here?
> Reading nvram is not a valid way to get brighness unless you also do
> similar work (parse specific vendor-proprietary SMBIOS structures) to
> ensure that you are reading the correct location. This location is
> subject to change from BIOS to BIOS and machine to machine. The fact
> that you may have observed it in the same location on a few laptops
> does not change this fact.
Well, folks reverse-engineering your machines had no idea until now...
> In fact, I have the same objection to the I8K driver in the kernel. It
> has hardcoded SMI calls, that are subject to change. There is a proper
> way to get the correct IO ports to make this safe, but it is not
> currently being done.
Could you or someone at Dell submit patches to correct this?
--
64 bytes from 195.113.31.123: icmp_seq=28 ttl=51 time=448769.1 ms
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