Re: Laptop shock detection and harddisk protection

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Wed Sep 17 2008 - 10:26:44 EST


On Fri 2008-09-12 09:59:47, Greg KH wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 01:35:54AM +0200, Tejun Heo wrote:
> > Shem Multinymous wrote:
> > >> That reduction comes because input device supports poll and
> > >> sysfs_notify_event() does about the same thing. The uesrland daemon
> > >> can just poll on a node and read data nodes when poll event on the
> > >> node triggeres.
> > >
> > > Agreed.
> > > There's another issue with the current sysfs interface, though: hdapsd
> > > needs to read (x,y,timestamp) tuples, whereas sysfs provides just x
> > > and y in separate attributes which cannot be read atomically together.
> > > We can add a sysfs file with "x y timestamp" readouts, though this is
> > > unusual for sysfs (and certainly incompatible with hwmon).
> >
> > Yes, right. Forgot about the atomicity part altogether. Thanks for
> > bringing it up.
> >
> > >> Unloading heads will be simple. Just echoing timeout in ms to sysfs
> > >> nodes, so I don't think it's a good idea to push out actual unloading
> > >> to another process especially as fork doesn't inherit mlockall.
> > >
> > > I had in mind another daemon listening for "unload now" events, so no
> > > forking needed.
> > > This second daemon might make sense if we push the logic of deciding
> > > *which* disks to unload into userspace, since this logic is the same
> > > for the ThinkPad style and the HP style.
> >
> > Hmmm... I can't (yet) see the benefit of having two separate userland
> > daemons.
> >
> > >> On a related note, is there any plan to merge tp_smapi to mainline?
> > >> It seems you put a lot of work into it and I don't really see why it
> > >> should stay out of tree.
> > >
> > > The only issue I'm aware of is finding a reasonably-named maintainer.
> > > On the technical side, the reviews on my lkml submission of
> > > thinkpad_ec+hdaps seemed good and all technical comments are since
> > > addressed. The code has been stable, well-tested and packaged by major
> > > distros for years.
> >
> > Cool, can you please post the patch to the lkml and cc Greg
> > Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxx>, Andrew Morton
> > <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> and me?
>
> Sorry, but no, I can't accept this code as it is coming from a "known
> anonymous" person containing information that it is not known where it
> came from.

So... what are you worried about?

> In short, "Signed-off-by:" from people who are known to be anonymous is
> not allowed.

That's okay. Signed-off-by: by original author is not required for
mainline merge. All that is required is submitter legally getting it
under GPL, and signing that off.

Now.. what are you worried about?

a) Copyrights?

b) Patents?

c) Trademarks?

d) Trade secrets?

e) Contracts between Shem and ...?

f) Some other contracts?

g) any other applicable laws? which?

h) anything else?

i) anything you can't talk about because NDAs or similar?

Based on the answer, we can try to figure way forward.

('power_now' is really useful for me; useful enough that I think about
reverse-engineering it from tp_smapi and reimplementation. Maybe even
doing it chinese-wall way if I can find second interested person. But
I need to know what the concerns are. ...plus, I guess Ciaran can help
with legal questions....)

Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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