[ltp] Re: [PATCH] Set osi=Linux for the ThinkPad X200s

[Karsten König]

I have to admit I don't really understand the technical aspects here, but I 
don't consider the current way broken, I don't want to unmute when I press the 
mute button.
The simple reason is I want my system to be silent, so no missbehaving 
application starts to blare while in the library, which is what most Laptops 
tend to do. If I press mute now I know it is muted no matter what, and I 
prefer that behaviour, so can I get this back when this is committed to 
mainline?
I thought pressing volume up/down was the way it always unmuted, even with 
Windows?

Karsten


Am Donnerstag, 26. November 2009 07:00:44 schrieb Andrew Lutomirski:
> On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 12:07 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> 
wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 01:24:50PM -0500, Len Brown wrote:
> >> Have these been verified as necessary to make sound work on
> >> the specified models, or are these speculative patches?
> >
> > To clarify - these patches do *nothing* to make sound work. They change
> > the behaviour of the mute key from changing the hardware state of the
> > mixer and not sending a key event to instead sending a key event and
> > requring that software perform the change. The behavioural change is
> > primarily cosmetic rather than functional. I'm not convinced that this
> > is a sensible thing to do at this point in the release cycle, given that
> > we have no testing of what other behavioural changes the firmware may
> > make.
> 
> It's a functional change in the sense that the mixer is not usefully
> supported right now (it's a file in /proc/acpi/ibm which is
> nonstandard and which no one should reasonably be expected to know
> about), it's useless (the standard HDA mixer works just fine), and
> without this change the mute button breaks sound for everyone except
> power users (who else is supposed to know to twiddle
> /proc/acpi/ibm/volume or press "sound up" to get sound back when the
> ALSA controls are already unmuted and set to maximum volume).
> 
> I'll grant that, with this change, Linux works differently from
> Windows, but I'm not sure that's a good argument for leaving this
> change out.  IMO in an ideal world, Lenovo would stop looking at
> OSI(Linux) and would also eliminate their weird mixer interface
> completely.  At least with this change we can continue ignoring the
> weird mixer interface until we have proper ALSA integration.
> 
> --Andy
>