Idea to help notebook users

[Adilson Oliveira]

Hi.

Following Henrik Ommas's suggestion, I'm re-posting this here.

I've thinking about an idea that have probably a ton of legal
implications but would help a lot mainly, but not only, notebook users.
You all know that notebooks are usually a complicated arena for Linux
and there is one simple think that can help a lot: having the correct
DSDT. DSDT is an acronym for Differentiated System Description Table
which basically describes your base system and resides into the BIOS.
The most common problem related to a wrong DSDT is the incorrect
generation of ACPI events.
The process to have a correct DSDT is basically:
1) dump from the machine.
2) decompile.
3) fix.
4) compile.
5) make the os load the correct DSDT table (there's several ways, being
via initrd the simplest to us).
"But the DSDT table should not be right from the start?" Yes but the
BIOS writers make it like many people make websites: they test with IE
whatever-they-have-installed only, do a bit of tweaking, seems to work,
done.
For instance, in my Asus G1, the function key to increase the LCD
brightness don't work because it does not generate the correct event.
Anyway, the idea would be have an application that could read the
machine ID, download the fixed DSDT table from somewhere (there's quite
a few here[1] already) and, automatically, make the kernel use it.
As I said, I don't know the legal implications that would have but would
be an interesting and simple way to fix a lot of known problems.
Let me know if it makes any sense or if I need to go to bed earlier  :)

[]s

Adilson.

[1]http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/view.php