[ltp] [PATCH] New ibm-acpi patches for extended thermal sensor functionality

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Sat, 16 Sep 2006, Stefan Schmidt wrote:
> Do you think about taking over the ibm-acpi maintainership? It seema
> as Borislav has no more time for this code.

I need to learn a lot more about writing code for the kernel before I'd even
consider asking Borislav to take over ibm-acpi.

I can certainly help with ibm-acpi, though.  And even if Borislav has little
time for the code, as long as patches sent upstream still get accepted (and
someone must be accepting them, 2.6.18 has silently added experimental
support for enabling/disabling WAN cards, without documenting it).

> It would be good to fetch all the patches flying around on this list
> and the wiki and submit them into main. Here are my small list with

Sure, one thing at a time.  Fan control goes next, but since there *are*
firmware bugs at play with fan control, that one needs more thought.

Which firmware bugs?  Well, the one I know for sure is that my T43 boots in
auto mode, but reports it is on manual level 7 until you give it a boot to
the head (like a S3 suspend).  Now imagine we wanted to handle persistence
across sleep, and stored current state trusting it to be correct?

> 1. Get rid of the experimental status of some features. See my patch
> on this ml.

But keep ecdump experimental.  Reading EC registers can have side-effects,
some registers are likely to be reset-on-read.  The EC has some
functionality that behaves this way, like HDAPS keyboard and mouse activity
detection, it is only sane to expect that stuff like that might be in the EC
register space too.

Writing blindly to EC space is *really* dangerous, too.

> 3. Integrate fan control. Patches on the wiki.

They need some polishing yet, IMHO.  And a signed-off from the first author.

> 4. Get rid of the of the docking feature and push the genric docking
> driver in main instead.

I can't help with that, unfortunately.  I don't own a dock.  But I believe
the generic docking driver IS in mainline already?

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh