Based on kernel version 2.6.39.1. Page generated on 2011-06-03 13:47 EST.
1 Acer Laptop WMI Extras Driver 2 http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi 3 Version 0.3 4 4th April 2009 5 6 Copyright 2007-2009 Carlos Corbacho <carlos@strangeworlds.co.uk> 7 8 acer-wmi is a driver to allow you to control various parts of your Acer laptop 9 hardware under Linux which are exposed via ACPI-WMI. 10 11 This driver completely replaces the old out-of-tree acer_acpi, which I am 12 currently maintaining for bug fixes only on pre-2.6.25 kernels. All development 13 work is now focused solely on acer-wmi. 14 15 Disclaimer 16 ********** 17 18 Acer and Wistron have provided nothing towards the development acer_acpi or 19 acer-wmi. All information we have has been through the efforts of the developers 20 and the users to discover as much as possible about the hardware. 21 22 As such, I do warn that this could break your hardware - this is extremely 23 unlikely of course, but please bear this in mind. 24 25 Background 26 ********** 27 28 acer-wmi is derived from acer_acpi, originally developed by Mark 29 Smith in 2005, then taken over by Carlos Corbacho in 2007, in order to activate 30 the wireless LAN card under a 64-bit version of Linux, as acerhk[1] (the 31 previous solution to the problem) relied on making 32 bit BIOS calls which are 32 not possible in kernel space from a 64 bit OS. 33 34 [1] acerhk: http://www.cakey.de/acerhk/ 35 36 Supported Hardware 37 ****************** 38 39 NOTE: The Acer Aspire One is not supported hardware. It cannot work with 40 acer-wmi until Acer fix their ACPI-WMI implementation on them, so has been 41 blacklisted until that happens. 42 43 Please see the website for the current list of known working hardware: 44 45 http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/wiki/SupportedHardware 46 47 If your laptop is not listed, or listed as unknown, and works with acer-wmi, 48 please contact me with a copy of the DSDT. 49 50 If your Acer laptop doesn't work with acer-wmi, I would also like to see the 51 DSDT. 52 53 To send me the DSDT, as root/sudo: 54 55 cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT > dsdt 56 57 And send me the resulting 'dsdt' file. 58 59 Usage 60 ***** 61 62 On Acer laptops, acer-wmi should already be autoloaded based on DMI matching. 63 For non-Acer laptops, until WMI based autoloading support is added, you will 64 need to manually load acer-wmi. 65 66 acer-wmi creates /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi, and fills it with various 67 files whose usage is detailed below, which enables you to control some of the 68 following (varies between models): 69 70 * the wireless LAN card radio 71 * inbuilt Bluetooth adapter 72 * inbuilt 3G card 73 * mail LED of your laptop 74 * brightness of the LCD panel 75 76 Wireless 77 ******** 78 79 With regards to wireless, all acer-wmi does is enable the radio on the card. It 80 is not responsible for the wireless LED - once the radio is enabled, this is 81 down to the wireless driver for your card. So the behaviour of the wireless LED, 82 once you enable the radio, will depend on your hardware and driver combination. 83 84 e.g. With the BCM4318 on the Acer Aspire 5020 series: 85 86 ndiswrapper: Light blinks on when transmitting 87 b43: Solid light, blinks off when transmitting 88 89 Wireless radio control is unconditionally enabled - all Acer laptops that support 90 acer-wmi come with built-in wireless. However, should you feel so inclined to 91 ever wish to remove the card, or swap it out at some point, please get in touch 92 with me, as we may well be able to gain some data on wireless card detection. 93 94 The wireless radio is exposed through rfkill. 95 96 Bluetooth 97 ********* 98 99 For bluetooth, this is an internal USB dongle, so once enabled, you will get 100 a USB device connection event, and a new USB device appears. When you disable 101 bluetooth, you get the reverse - a USB device disconnect event, followed by the 102 device disappearing again. 103 104 Bluetooth is autodetected by acer-wmi, so if you do not have a bluetooth module 105 installed in your laptop, this file won't exist (please be aware that it is 106 quite common for Acer not to fit bluetooth to their laptops - so just because 107 you have a bluetooth button on the laptop, doesn't mean that bluetooth is 108 installed). 109 110 For the adventurously minded - if you want to buy an internal bluetooth 111 module off the internet that is compatible with your laptop and fit it, then 112 it will work just fine with acer-wmi. 113 114 Bluetooth is exposed through rfkill. 115 116 3G 117 ** 118 119 3G is currently not autodetected, so the 'threeg' file is always created under 120 sysfs. So far, no-one in possession of an Acer laptop with 3G built-in appears to 121 have tried Linux, or reported back, so we don't have any information on this. 122 123 If you have an Acer laptop that does have a 3G card in, please contact me so we 124 can properly detect these, and find out a bit more about them. 125 126 To read the status of the 3G card (0=off, 1=on): 127 cat /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 128 129 To enable the 3G card: 130 echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 131 132 To disable the 3G card: 133 echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 134 135 To set the state of the 3G card when loading acer-wmi, pass: 136 threeg=X (where X is 0 or 1) 137 138 Mail LED 139 ******** 140 141 This can be found in most older Acer laptops supported by acer-wmi, and many 142 newer ones - it is built into the 'mail' button, and blinks when active. 143 144 On newer (WMID) laptops though, we have no way of detecting the mail LED. If 145 your laptop identifies itself in dmesg as a WMID model, then please try loading 146 acer_acpi with: 147 148 force_series=2490 149 150 This will use a known alternative method of reading/ writing the mail LED. If 151 it works, please report back to me with the DMI data from your laptop so this 152 can be added to acer-wmi. 153 154 The LED is exposed through the LED subsystem, and can be found in: 155 156 /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/leds/acer-wmi::mail/ 157 158 The mail LED is autodetected, so if you don't have one, the LED device won't 159 be registered. 160 161 Backlight 162 ********* 163 164 The backlight brightness control is available on all acer-wmi supported 165 hardware. The maximum brightness level is usually 15, but on some newer laptops 166 it's 10 (this is again autodetected). 167 168 The backlight is exposed through the backlight subsystem, and can be found in: 169 170 /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/backlight/acer-wmi/ 171 172 Credits 173 ******* 174 175 Olaf Tauber, who did the real hard work when he developed acerhk 176 http://www.cakey.de/acerhk/ 177 All the authors of laptop ACPI modules in the kernel, whose work 178 was an inspiration in the early days of acer_acpi 179 Mathieu Segaud, who solved the problem with having to modprobe the driver 180 twice in acer_acpi 0.2. 181 Jim Ramsay, who added support for the WMID interface 182 Mark Smith, who started the original acer_acpi 183 184 And the many people who have used both acer_acpi and acer-wmi.