Message-ID: <49814.213.30.172.234.1159357906.squirrel@webmail.popies.net>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:51:46 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Re: sonypc with Sony Vaio VGN-SZ1VP
From: stelian@popies.net
To: "Len Brown" <lenb@kernel.org>
Cc: "Andrew Morton" <akpm@osdl.org>, "Ismail Donmez" <ismail@pardus.org.tr>,
       "Stelian Pop" <stelian@popies.net>, "Andrea Gelmini" <gelma@gelma.net>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-acpi@vger.kernel.org
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>> > Will sony_acpi ever make it to the mainline? Its very useful for new
>> Vaio
>> > models.
>
> Nope, not as it is.  Useful != supportable.
>
> 1. It must not create any files under /proc/acpi
>     This is creating a machine-specific API, which
>     is exactly what we don't want  Nobody can maintain
>     50 machine specific APIs.
>
>     These objects must appear generic and under sysfs
>     as if acpi were not involved in providing them.
>
> 2. its source code shall not live in drivers/acpi
>     it is not part of the ACPI implementation after all --
>     it is a platform specific driver.

In this case, would a patch ripping off asus_acpi, ibm_acpi and
toshiba_acpi  from the kernel be accepted ?

I don't really care much about sony_acpi (since I'm not maintaining it
anymore, even if I still answer support requests about it), but this is
just silly. This has been going on for more than one and a half year now.

Meanwhile (at least from what I've seen), the ACPI subsystem still doesn't
provide this "generic" API which platform specific driver need to
implement. drivers/acpi/{hotkey.c,video.c} are just rudimentary, and there
is no indication that this is going forward:

In March 2005 you (Len) said:

> The goal is to DELETE ibm, toshiba, and asus drivers -- or at least the
> duplicated functions in them.
>
> platform specific drivers make it harder, not easier, to support more
> hardware -- there are a zillion vendors out there, implementing special
> drivers for each of them is a strategy of last resort.

and

> I'd like to keep this driver out-of-tree
> until we prove that we can't enhance the
> generic code to handle this hardware
> without the addition of a new driver.

How long is this going to take ?

Stelian.

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