1Acer Laptop WMI Extras Driver 2http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi 3Version 0.2 418th August 2008 5 6Copyright 2007-2008 Carlos Corbacho <carlos@strangeworlds.co.uk> 7 8acer-wmi is a driver to allow you to control various parts of your Acer laptop 9hardware under Linux which are exposed via ACPI-WMI. 10 11This driver completely replaces the old out-of-tree acer_acpi, which I am 12currently maintaining for bug fixes only on pre-2.6.25 kernels. All development 13work is now focused solely on acer-wmi. 14 15Disclaimer 16********** 17 18Acer and Wistron have provided nothing towards the development acer_acpi or 19acer-wmi. All information we have has been through the efforts of the developers 20and the users to discover as much as possible about the hardware. 21 22As such, I do warn that this could break your hardware - this is extremely 23unlikely of course, but please bear this in mind. 24 25Background 26********** 27 28acer-wmi is derived from acer_acpi, originally developed by Mark 29Smith in 2005, then taken over by Carlos Corbacho in 2007, in order to activate 30the wireless LAN card under a 64-bit version of Linux, as acerhk[1] (the 31previous solution to the problem) relied on making 32 bit BIOS calls which are 32not possible in kernel space from a 64 bit OS. 33 34[1] acerhk: http://www.cakey.de/acerhk/ 35 36Supported Hardware 37****************** 38 39Please see the website for the current list of known working hardare: 40 41http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/wiki/SupportedHardware 42 43If your laptop is not listed, or listed as unknown, and works with acer-wmi, 44please contact me with a copy of the DSDT. 45 46If your Acer laptop doesn't work with acer-wmi, I would also like to see the 47DSDT. 48 49To send me the DSDT, as root/sudo: 50 51cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT > dsdt 52 53And send me the resulting 'dsdt' file. 54 55Usage 56***** 57 58On Acer laptops, acer-wmi should already be autoloaded based on DMI matching. 59For non-Acer laptops, until WMI based autoloading support is added, you will 60need to manually load acer-wmi. 61 62acer-wmi creates /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi, and fills it with various 63files whose usage is detailed below, which enables you to control some of the 64following (varies between models): 65 66* the wireless LAN card radio 67* inbuilt Bluetooth adapter 68* inbuilt 3G card 69* mail LED of your laptop 70* brightness of the LCD panel 71 72Wireless 73******** 74 75With regards to wireless, all acer-wmi does is enable the radio on the card. It 76is not responsible for the wireless LED - once the radio is enabled, this is 77down to the wireless driver for your card. So the behaviour of the wireless LED, 78once you enable the radio, will depend on your hardware and driver combination. 79 80e.g. With the BCM4318 on the Acer Aspire 5020 series: 81 82ndiswrapper: Light blinks on when transmitting 83b43: Solid light, blinks off when transmitting 84 85Wireless radio control is unconditionally enabled - all Acer laptops that support 86acer-wmi come with built-in wireless. However, should you feel so inclined to 87ever wish to remove the card, or swap it out at some point, please get in touch 88with me, as we may well be able to gain some data on wireless card detection. 89 90The wireless radio is exposed through rfkill. 91 92Bluetooth 93********* 94 95For bluetooth, this is an internal USB dongle, so once enabled, you will get 96a USB device connection event, and a new USB device appears. When you disable 97bluetooth, you get the reverse - a USB device disconnect event, followed by the 98device disappearing again. 99 100Bluetooth is autodetected by acer-wmi, so if you do not have a bluetooth module 101installed in your laptop, this file won't exist (please be aware that it is 102quite common for Acer not to fit bluetooth to their laptops - so just because 103you have a bluetooth button on the laptop, doesn't mean that bluetooth is 104installed). 105 106For the adventurously minded - if you want to buy an internal bluetooth 107module off the internet that is compatible with your laptop and fit it, then 108it will work just fine with acer-wmi. 109 110Bluetooth is exposed through rfkill. 111 1123G 113** 114 1153G is currently not autodetected, so the 'threeg' file is always created under 116sysfs. So far, no-one in possession of an Acer laptop with 3G built-in appears to 117have tried Linux, or reported back, so we don't have any information on this. 118 119If you have an Acer laptop that does have a 3G card in, please contact me so we 120can properly detect these, and find out a bit more about them. 121 122To read the status of the 3G card (0=off, 1=on): 123cat /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 124 125To enable the 3G card: 126echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 127 128To disable the 3G card: 129echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 130 131To set the state of the 3G card when loading acer-wmi, pass: 132threeg=X (where X is 0 or 1) 133 134Mail LED 135******** 136 137This can be found in most older Acer laptops supported by acer-wmi, and many 138newer ones - it is built into the 'mail' button, and blinks when active. 139 140On newer (WMID) laptops though, we have no way of detecting the mail LED. If 141your laptop identifies itself in dmesg as a WMID model, then please try loading 142acer_acpi with: 143 144force_series=2490 145 146This will use a known alternative method of reading/ writing the mail LED. If 147it works, please report back to me with the DMI data from your laptop so this 148can be added to acer-wmi. 149 150The LED is exposed through the LED subsystem, and can be found in: 151 152/sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/leds/acer-wmi::mail/ 153 154The mail LED is autodetected, so if you don't have one, the LED device won't 155be registered. 156 157Backlight 158********* 159 160The backlight brightness control is available on all acer-wmi supported 161hardware. The maximum brightness level is usually 15, but on some newer laptops 162it's 10 (this is again autodetected). 163 164The backlight is exposed through the backlight subsystem, and can be found in: 165 166/sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/backlight/acer-wmi/ 167 168Credits 169******* 170 171Olaf Tauber, who did the real hard work when he developed acerhk 172http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~tauber/acerhk 173All the authors of laptop ACPI modules in the kernel, whose work 174was an inspiration in the early days of acer_acpi 175Mathieu Segaud, who solved the problem with having to modprobe the driver 176twice in acer_acpi 0.2. 177Jim Ramsay, who added support for the WMID interface 178Mark Smith, who started the original acer_acpi 179 180And the many people who have used both acer_acpi and acer-wmi. 181