[ltp] thinkpad-acpi on X61s

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Peter Frühberger wrote:
> I tried thinkpad acpi version 0.15 on my new X61s.

Yay.  Brand new thinkpad model, brand new BIOS, brand new regressions in the
thinkpad firmware interfaces, as courtesy from our new thinkpad vendor and
their firmware team that apparently finaly lost their last ties with the IBM
people.

Please send me the dmidecode and acpidump output.

Please update the thinkwiki.org with the information on the X61s.  It's BIOS
(7N) is a complete unknown.  It's EC firmwre is also completely unknown.

At least now we know for sure that Lenovo really decided to ship EC firmware
with a different model than the BIOS it requires.  Argh.  Well, that's easy
enough to cope with.

> What is working:
> bluetooth, leds

Pure ACPI stuff.  Probably beep is also working.  Can you test that?

> brightness is extremely buggy ?!? If video acpi module is loaded nothing
> works, sometimes level 1 und level 7 seem to work, but xbacklight is doing 
> a
> better job here.

I am *really* considering blacklisting brightness control on all *61.
Lenovo is moving it away from the firmware to stock ACPI anyway.

Please test in BIOS or in single user mode how the birghtness keys work.
Tell me how many brightness levels there are for real (8 or 16?) as well.
Try messing with the brightness with the ACPI video driver *loaded*, but
with the X driver unloaded (i.e. in console mode without X running).

> This little thing is extremely loud ;-) i had an R40 before and nearly 
> never
> heard the fan.

Lenovo is not using fans with the permanent magnets in the blades (far less
noise, quite a bit more expensive since it is patented by just one company),
that's for sure.

> EC 0x30: *07  00 *12  00 *30 *04  00  00 *c3  00 *20 *10 *2a *50  00  00

This looks like either it needs brightness_mode=3, or that you tried to use
thinkpad_acpi < 20070708 in it.  Please test with the system in a clean
state (power *off* and remove AC cord to clean the EC state), and
thinkpad_acpi default (for Lenovo thinkpads) brightness_mode=2.  Check if
this register (EC 0x30) changes, and report back.

> After updating the bios version to 1.05 (not a very good idea) the hotkeys
> stopped working at all :-(

Actually, it was a good idea.  You guys that got *61 boxes will need to
cooperate a lot with me, and be ready to file up lots of complaints with
Lenovo to fix BIOS defects when needed, if you want thinkpads to remain
Linux-friendly.

Sooner or later, you'd need to update the BIOS and EC because of some
serious bugs, and you'd hit the issues anyway.

-- 
  "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