Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756099AbXJOVqN (ORCPT ); Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:46:13 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751722AbXJOVp5 (ORCPT ); Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:45:57 -0400 Received: from pentafluge.infradead.org ([213.146.154.40]:37224 "EHLO pentafluge.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1759024AbXJOVpz (ORCPT ); Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:45:55 -0400 Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:43:49 -0700 From: Arjan van de Ven To: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh Cc: Jeremy Katz , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, torvalds@linux-foundation.org, davej@redhat.com Subject: Re: [PATCH] Map volume and brightness events on thinkpads Message-ID: <20071015144349.2e31f98a@laptopd505.fenrus.org> In-Reply-To: <20071015210737.GA15293@khazad-dum.debian.net> References: <1192481110-9299-1-git-send-email-katzj@redhat.com> <20071015210737.GA15293@khazad-dum.debian.net> Organization: Intel X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.0.2 (GTK+ 2.12.0; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1887 Lines: 39 On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:07:37 -0200 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Jeremy Katz wrote: > > There are standard keycodes for brightness and volume; map the > > events to emit them so that things work properly > > NAK. It is the completely wrong thing to do for IBM thinkpads which > process volume and brightness completely in firmware. > > And the input subsystem maintainer has made it extremely clear in > various threads that the input devices are *not* to be used as a > notification service for on-screen-display or other such stuff. If > you send volume and brightness *key* events to userspace, it is > supposed to act on them and raise/lower brightness/volume, which is > the wrong thing to do on thinkpads. Never mind that HAL is ignoring > the input maintainer's directions and violating this. > > We should fix the backlight class to be more useful and support > poll() or somesuch, for userspace to track the backlight level in a > resource-friendly way for OSD (the only sane thing to do on an IBM > thinkpad with such events). And an ALSA mixer to provide a proper > path to the thinkpad-acpi volume functionality is also in my schedule > for 2.6.25. > there is a huge problem with this though: Depending on your graphics chip, it's the graphics driver, not the bios, that does the backlight control...... in fact the trend in hardware (this is what windows does) is have the OS take over the control of all of this as soon as possible... Linux should do this with software control as well for that reason; the other approach just isn't going to be possible in the long term ;( - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/