Documentation/laptops/acer-wmi.txt - linux - Git at Google

 Acer Laptop WMI Extras Driver
 http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi
 Version 0.3
 4th April 2009

 Copyright 2007-2009 Carlos Corbacho <carlos@strangeworlds.co.uk>

 acer-wmi is a driver to allow you to control various parts of your Acer laptop
 hardware under Linux which are exposed via ACPI-WMI.

 This driver completely replaces the old out-of-tree acer_acpi, which I am
 currently maintaining for bug fixes only on pre-2.6.25 kernels. All development
 work is now focused solely on acer-wmi.

 Disclaimer
 **********

 Acer and Wistron have provided nothing towards the development acer_acpi or
 acer-wmi. All information we have has been through the efforts of the developers
 and the users to discover as much as possible about the hardware.

 As such, I do warn that this could break your hardware - this is extremely
 unlikely of course, but please bear this in mind.

 Background
 **********

 acer-wmi is derived from acer_acpi, originally developed by Mark
 Smith in 2005, then taken over by Carlos Corbacho in 2007, in order to activate
 the wireless LAN card under a 64-bit version of Linux, as acerhk[1] (the
 previous solution to the problem) relied on making 32 bit BIOS calls which are
 not possible in kernel space from a 64 bit OS.

 [1] acerhk: http://www.cakey.de/acerhk/

 Supported Hardware
 ******************

 NOTE: The Acer Aspire One is not supported hardware. It cannot work with
 acer-wmi until Acer fix their ACPI-WMI implementation on them, so has been
 blacklisted until that happens.

 Please see the website for the current list of known working hardware:

 http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/wiki/SupportedHardware

 If your laptop is not listed, or listed as unknown, and works with acer-wmi,
 please contact me with a copy of the DSDT.

 If your Acer laptop doesn't work with acer-wmi, I would also like to see the
 DSDT.

 To send me the DSDT, as root/sudo:

 cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT > dsdt

 And send me the resulting 'dsdt' file.

 Usage
 *****

 On Acer laptops, acer-wmi should already be autoloaded based on DMI matching.
 For non-Acer laptops, until WMI based autoloading support is added, you will
 need to manually load acer-wmi.

 acer-wmi creates /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi, and fills it with various
 files whose usage is detailed below, which enables you to control some of the
 following (varies between models):

 * the wireless LAN card radio
 * inbuilt Bluetooth adapter
 * inbuilt 3G card
 * mail LED of your laptop
 * brightness of the LCD panel

 Wireless
 ********

 With regards to wireless, all acer-wmi does is enable the radio on the card. It
 is not responsible for the wireless LED - once the radio is enabled, this is
 down to the wireless driver for your card. So the behaviour of the wireless LED,
 once you enable the radio, will depend on your hardware and driver combination.

 e.g. With the BCM4318 on the Acer Aspire 5020 series:

 ndiswrapper: Light blinks on when transmitting
 b43: Solid light, blinks off when transmitting

 Wireless radio control is unconditionally enabled - all Acer laptops that support
 acer-wmi come with built-in wireless. However, should you feel so inclined to
 ever wish to remove the card, or swap it out at some point, please get in touch
 with me, as we may well be able to gain some data on wireless card detection.

 The wireless radio is exposed through rfkill.

 Bluetooth
 *********

 For bluetooth, this is an internal USB dongle, so once enabled, you will get
 a USB device connection event, and a new USB device appears. When you disable
 bluetooth, you get the reverse - a USB device disconnect event, followed by the
 device disappearing again.

 Bluetooth is autodetected by acer-wmi, so if you do not have a bluetooth module
 installed in your laptop, this file won't exist (please be aware that it is
 quite common for Acer not to fit bluetooth to their laptops - so just because
 you have a bluetooth button on the laptop, doesn't mean that bluetooth is
 installed).

 For the adventurously minded - if you want to buy an internal bluetooth
 module off the internet that is compatible with your laptop and fit it, then
 it will work just fine with acer-wmi.

 Bluetooth is exposed through rfkill.

 3G
 **

 3G is currently not autodetected, so the 'threeg' file is always created under
 sysfs. So far, no-one in possession of an Acer laptop with 3G built-in appears to
 have tried Linux, or reported back, so we don't have any information on this.

 If you have an Acer laptop that does have a 3G card in, please contact me so we
 can properly detect these, and find out a bit more about them.

 To read the status of the 3G card (0=off, 1=on):
 cat /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg

 To enable the 3G card:
 echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg

 To disable the 3G card:
 echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg

 To set the state of the 3G card when loading acer-wmi, pass:
 threeg=X (where X is 0 or 1)

 Mail LED
 ********

 This can be found in most older Acer laptops supported by acer-wmi, and many
 newer ones - it is built into the 'mail' button, and blinks when active.

 On newer (WMID) laptops though, we have no way of detecting the mail LED. If
 your laptop identifies itself in dmesg as a WMID model, then please try loading
 acer_acpi with:

 force_series=2490

 This will use a known alternative method of reading/ writing the mail LED. If
 it works, please report back to me with the DMI data from your laptop so this
 can be added to acer-wmi.

 The LED is exposed through the LED subsystem, and can be found in:

 /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/leds/acer-wmi::mail/

 The mail LED is autodetected, so if you don't have one, the LED device won't
 be registered.

 Backlight
 *********

 The backlight brightness control is available on all acer-wmi supported
 hardware. The maximum brightness level is usually 15, but on some newer laptops
 it's 10 (this is again autodetected).

 The backlight is exposed through the backlight subsystem, and can be found in:

 /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/backlight/acer-wmi/

 Credits
 *******

 Olaf Tauber, who did the real hard work when he developed acerhk
 http://www.cakey.de/acerhk/
 All the authors of laptop ACPI modules in the kernel, whose work
 was an inspiration in the early days of acer_acpi
 Mathieu Segaud, who solved the problem with having to modprobe the driver
 twice in acer_acpi 0.2.
 Jim Ramsay, who added support for the WMID interface
 Mark Smith, who started the original acer_acpi

 And the many people who have used both acer_acpi and acer-wmi.
	Acer Laptop WMI Extras Driver
	http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi
	Version 0.3
	4th April 2009

	Copyright 2007-2009 Carlos Corbacho <carlos@strangeworlds.co.uk>

	acer-wmi is a driver to allow you to control various parts of your Acer laptop
	hardware under Linux which are exposed via ACPI-WMI.

	This driver completely replaces the old out-of-tree acer_acpi, which I am
	currently maintaining for bug fixes only on pre-2.6.25 kernels. All development
	work is now focused solely on acer-wmi.

	Disclaimer
	**********

	Acer and Wistron have provided nothing towards the development acer_acpi or
	acer-wmi. All information we have has been through the efforts of the developers
	and the users to discover as much as possible about the hardware.

	As such, I do warn that this could break your hardware - this is extremely
	unlikely of course, but please bear this in mind.

	Background
	**********

	acer-wmi is derived from acer_acpi, originally developed by Mark
	Smith in 2005, then taken over by Carlos Corbacho in 2007, in order to activate
	the wireless LAN card under a 64-bit version of Linux, as acerhk[1] (the
	previous solution to the problem) relied on making 32 bit BIOS calls which are
	not possible in kernel space from a 64 bit OS.

	[1] acerhk: http://www.cakey.de/acerhk/

	Supported Hardware
	******************

	NOTE: The Acer Aspire One is not supported hardware. It cannot work with
	acer-wmi until Acer fix their ACPI-WMI implementation on them, so has been
	blacklisted until that happens.

	Please see the website for the current list of known working hardware:

	http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/wiki/SupportedHardware

	If your laptop is not listed, or listed as unknown, and works with acer-wmi,
	please contact me with a copy of the DSDT.

	If your Acer laptop doesn't work with acer-wmi, I would also like to see the
	DSDT.

	To send me the DSDT, as root/sudo:

	cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT > dsdt

	And send me the resulting 'dsdt' file.

	Usage
	*****

	On Acer laptops, acer-wmi should already be autoloaded based on DMI matching.
	For non-Acer laptops, until WMI based autoloading support is added, you will
	need to manually load acer-wmi.

	acer-wmi creates /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi, and fills it with various
	files whose usage is detailed below, which enables you to control some of the
	following (varies between models):

	* the wireless LAN card radio
	* inbuilt Bluetooth adapter
	* inbuilt 3G card
	* mail LED of your laptop
	* brightness of the LCD panel

	Wireless
	********

	With regards to wireless, all acer-wmi does is enable the radio on the card. It
	is not responsible for the wireless LED - once the radio is enabled, this is
	down to the wireless driver for your card. So the behaviour of the wireless LED,
	once you enable the radio, will depend on your hardware and driver combination.

	e.g. With the BCM4318 on the Acer Aspire 5020 series:

	ndiswrapper: Light blinks on when transmitting
	b43: Solid light, blinks off when transmitting

	Wireless radio control is unconditionally enabled - all Acer laptops that support
	acer-wmi come with built-in wireless. However, should you feel so inclined to
	ever wish to remove the card, or swap it out at some point, please get in touch
	with me, as we may well be able to gain some data on wireless card detection.

	The wireless radio is exposed through rfkill.

	Bluetooth
	*********

	For bluetooth, this is an internal USB dongle, so once enabled, you will get
	a USB device connection event, and a new USB device appears. When you disable
	bluetooth, you get the reverse - a USB device disconnect event, followed by the
	device disappearing again.

	Bluetooth is autodetected by acer-wmi, so if you do not have a bluetooth module
	installed in your laptop, this file won't exist (please be aware that it is
	quite common for Acer not to fit bluetooth to their laptops - so just because
	you have a bluetooth button on the laptop, doesn't mean that bluetooth is
	installed).

	For the adventurously minded - if you want to buy an internal bluetooth
	module off the internet that is compatible with your laptop and fit it, then
	it will work just fine with acer-wmi.

	Bluetooth is exposed through rfkill.

	3G
	**

	3G is currently not autodetected, so the 'threeg' file is always created under
	sysfs. So far, no-one in possession of an Acer laptop with 3G built-in appears to
	have tried Linux, or reported back, so we don't have any information on this.

	If you have an Acer laptop that does have a 3G card in, please contact me so we
	can properly detect these, and find out a bit more about them.

	To read the status of the 3G card (0=off, 1=on):
	cat /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg

	To enable the 3G card:
	echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg

	To disable the 3G card:
	echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg

	To set the state of the 3G card when loading acer-wmi, pass:
	threeg=X (where X is 0 or 1)

	Mail LED
	********

	This can be found in most older Acer laptops supported by acer-wmi, and many
	newer ones - it is built into the 'mail' button, and blinks when active.

	On newer (WMID) laptops though, we have no way of detecting the mail LED. If
	your laptop identifies itself in dmesg as a WMID model, then please try loading
	acer_acpi with:

	force_series=2490

	This will use a known alternative method of reading/ writing the mail LED. If
	it works, please report back to me with the DMI data from your laptop so this
	can be added to acer-wmi.

	The LED is exposed through the LED subsystem, and can be found in:

	/sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/leds/acer-wmi::mail/

	The mail LED is autodetected, so if you don't have one, the LED device won't
	be registered.

	Backlight
	*********

	The backlight brightness control is available on all acer-wmi supported
	hardware. The maximum brightness level is usually 15, but on some newer laptops
	it's 10 (this is again autodetected).

	The backlight is exposed through the backlight subsystem, and can be found in:

	/sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/backlight/acer-wmi/

	Credits
	*******

	Olaf Tauber, who did the real hard work when he developed acerhk
	http://www.cakey.de/acerhk/
	All the authors of laptop ACPI modules in the kernel, whose work
	was an inspiration in the early days of acer_acpi
	Mathieu Segaud, who solved the problem with having to modprobe the driver
	twice in acer_acpi 0.2.
	Jim Ramsay, who added support for the WMID interface
	Mark Smith, who started the original acer_acpi

	And the many people who have used both acer_acpi and acer-wmi.