[ltp] Re: [ibm-acpi-devel] Upcoming changes to thinkpad-acpi (your chance to comment on them)

[Jim Paris]

> Then the ones that are very nice, but are available only on fairly recent
> ThinkPad BIOSes:
> 
> 4. New HKEY notifications for overtemperature on the mainboard and battery!
> 
> Thanks to some official help, the driver will know when your thinkpad is
> about to melt down or go out of juice, and will warn you accordingly through
> syslog and an ACPI event (that HAL can trap and do something with).

Has there been any effort to coordinate with the HAL guys to get this
event handled properly at the same time?  From a user point of view it
often seems that the kernel and userspace components are out of sync
and giving them a heads-up could be helpful.

> 1. EC write access will be moved from "experimental" (which it isn't!) to a
> new "dangerous" mode.  And it will be documented (it isn't, right now).  The
> driver will bitch on the logs, and taint the kernel when you use this
> facility for the first time
..
> 2. I will be restricting access to all LEDs but the ThinkLight, "power" and
> "standby".
> 
> One will need to jump through some loops (probably including modifying the
> kernel source code and enabling some Kconfig options)

Seems arbitrary that a potentially dangerous operation like writing to
the EC just complains and taints, while blinking lights isn't allowed
at all without source changes.  Is there a technical reason the LEDs
need to be more restricted than EC writes?

-jim