[patch] poll the NVRAM area to pick up Thinkpad button presses

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 12:31 +0200, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> On Mittwoch, 16. Mai 2007, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > > I maybe oversee something, but I think the patch is not needed. Simply
> > > install the hotkey-setup package (as far as I can see used currently by
> > > SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu) and you get all the events via the input layer.
> > > Tested with X41 and X60.
> >
> > The point is that it doesn't require the installation of an extra
> > package, and that it can use HAL's matching, and system to make sure the
> > keys are working.
> 
> But we don't need code duplication. We don't need to implement everything in 
> HAL if there are already a _well_ working solutions which are used by several 
> major distributions. And adding this to HAL would lead to conflicts, because 
> this package already handle several machines, not only IBM/Lenovo.

Chill! The proper fix is moving these keys into the kernel and
abstracting them as input events there. I don't want this patch merged,
it was just an example of how simple we can make the nvram reading.

> > In any case, the real goal is to get the keys handled directly in the
> > kernel. See:
> > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.acpi.ibm-acpi.devel/395
> 
> An other good reason not to implement this in HAL. If this work you only need 
> to uninstall/drop the hotkey-setup package and it would work without a HAL 
> update.

When thinkpad_acpi and the others get INPUT events like ACPI buttons,
then a lot of these userspace daemons (including the hal input addons)
can be confined to history.

Richard.