Re: [REGRESSION/PATCH] acpi: blacklist win8 OSI for ASUS ZenbokPrime UX31A

From: Matthew Garrett
Date: Wed Jul 31 2013 - 13:52:42 EST


On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 12:46:04PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> That doesn't change the fact that you were wrong, and there *is*
> actually a way. The fact that you don't want to go there doesn't mean
> it's not there.

A quirk list will be incomplete, and as such there's no way to guarantee
whether or not a value of 0 will turn off the backlight. This is why the
interface doesn't make that guarantee, and why any userspace that
depends upon that behaviour is behaving incorrectly.

> Here's another: device tree.

There's no functional distinction between device tree and a quirk list
on x86 - they're both static data sources provided by something other
than the system firmware. As a result, they will both be incomplete.

> There are ways to provide a consistent backlight interface to user-space.

No, there aren't. What you *can* do is propose to change the ABI
description for the sysfs backlight interface such that any system where
0 turns off the backlight is considered buggy, but that won't make those
systems vanish. A good interface doesn't promise things it can't
guarantee, so I'd expect that any such proposal would be rejected.

--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/