[ltp] T60p officially supported with SuSE SLED 10 by Levono

[Andrew Barr]

On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 00:57 +0300, Shem Multinymous wrote:
> Can someone post a review of the functionality provided by Lenovo's
> packages, and in particular whether it has anything in common with
> tp_smapi and hdaps?

Well, it loads on my 2.6.18-rc4 kernel with 'modprobe --force' (albeit
tainting the kernel) but it doesn't really _do_ anything, presumably
because this is an R51 and not a T60p. Doing 'strings batinfo.ko | less'
reveals symbols for creating /proc directories (proc_mkdir). Also, it
appears to output status information similar to tp_smapi (stats like
first use date, etc. appear there) but there are a few things that
appear to be new and unknown--"Condition Flag", "OverChargedAlarm",
"TerminateChargeAlarm" are among a few. 

The use of ioport_resource would probably indicate that they are using
an I/O port, probably the same one tp_smapi does, right?

I think, though, that someone should request that they release the
source code to that kernel module. I would do it myself, but I'm not
sure of the exact legal situation that binary modules are in. The way I
understand it, nVidia and company tread on thin ice as it is with the
source-code-wrapper-and-interesting-stuff-in-a-binary-blob approach, and
from what I've seen kernel developers and others say, just releasing
a .ko file is about as verboten as it gets.

I assume Shem wouldn't have issues looking at GPLed source code, and if
we could convince Lenovo to release the module code it might clear up
some of the concerns that were voiced on LKML about the origins of
tp_smapi's knowledge of ThinkPad hardware.

Andrew