Re: [PATCH 00/22] Fallback to native backlight

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 10/24/22 15:14, Pali Rohár wrote:
> On Monday 24 October 2022 21:58:57 Akihiko Odaki wrote:
>> Regarding the second limitation, I don't even understand the difference
>> between vendor and native. My guess is that a vendor backlight device uses
>> vendor-specific ACPI interface, and a native one directly uses hardware
>> registers. If my guess is correct, the difference between vendor and native
>> does not imply that both of them are likely to exist at the same time. As
>> the conclusion, there is no more motivation to try to de-duplicate the
>> vendor/native combination than to try to de-duplicate combination of devices
>> with a single type.
> 
> Hello! I just want to point one thing. On some Dell laptops there are
> 3 different ways (= 3 different APIs) how to control display backlight.
> There is ACPI driver (uses ACPI), GPU/DRM driver (i915.ko; uses directly
> HW) and platform vendor driver (dell-laptop.ko; uses vendor BIOS or
> firmware API).

Right and that is just one example of laptops which can register both
vendor + native backlight devices, which is why this whole series is
a bad idea.

Regards,

Hans



> Just every driver has different pre-calculated scaling
> values. So sometimes user wants to choose different driver just because
> it allows to set backlight level with "better" granularity. Registering
> all 3 device drivers is bad as user does not want to see 3 display
> panels and forcing registration of specific one without runtime option
> is also bad (some of those drivers do not have to be suitable or has
> worse granularity as other).