On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 10:09:28AM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote: > Hi Guenter, > > On Tue, 02 Dec 2014 06:26:29 -0800, Guenter Roeck wrote: > > On 12/02/2014 05:23 AM, Jean Delvare wrote: > > > Ultimately /proc/i8k should be killed altogether and every function > > > should use the appropriate standard interface. But I don't have any Dell > > > laptop around so I won't go into that myself. > > > > The only function not covered by hwmon, as far as I can see, is reading > > the "Fn key" status, whatever that is, and reporting the power status > > (AC or battery). > > > > The first seems to be covered by the already existing dell drivers in > > platform/x86. The latter must be covered as well; Linux does > > display the correct power status on all my Dell laptops. > > How old are they? The i8k driver is ancestral, so I could imagine that > i8k is the only way to report power status on very old Dell laptop > models. Or maybe not, I just don't know. > > > Changing the ABI is not supposed to happen, so I am not sure if we can > > just drop the /proc interface. > > Dropping deprecated interfaces after a transition period is not so > uncommon. AFAIK the proc interface of i8k is only used by the i8kutils > user-space package, which FWIW is no longer part of openSUSE. The
It is still in Ubuntu 14.04. > dell-laptop and dell-wmi drivers are almost 6 years old, that looks > like an already very comfortable transition period to me. > Hi Jean, Fine with me. My oldest laptop is about 10 years old. > That being said, that's only my opinion and I'm not going to fight for > this. If the hwmon interface is moved to dell-laptop and i8k is killed, > I'm happy. If the i8k driver is moved to drivers/hwmon and stripped > down, I'm happy. But if none of this happens, I don't really care, to > be honest. > I am all for getting rid of it, question is only how to do it, and if it really can be done. A quick glance into Lauchpad shows that i8kutils is still maintained and used, including the sometimes dirty tricks it provides. Guenter -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
