1Acer Laptop WMI Extras Driver 2http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi 3Version 0.3 44th April 2009 5 6Copyright 2007-2009 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 39NOTE: The Acer Aspire One is not supported hardware. It cannot work with 40acer-wmi until Acer fix their ACPI-WMI implementation on them, so has been 41blacklisted until that happens. 42 43Please see the website for the current list of known working hardware: 44 45http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/wiki/SupportedHardware 46 47If your laptop is not listed, or listed as unknown, and works with acer-wmi, 48please contact me with a copy of the DSDT. 49 50If your Acer laptop doesn't work with acer-wmi, I would also like to see the 51DSDT. 52 53To send me the DSDT, as root/sudo: 54 55cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT > dsdt 56 57And send me the resulting 'dsdt' file. 58 59Usage 60***** 61 62On Acer laptops, acer-wmi should already be autoloaded based on DMI matching. 63For non-Acer laptops, until WMI based autoloading support is added, you will 64need to manually load acer-wmi. 65 66acer-wmi creates /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi, and fills it with various 67files whose usage is detailed below, which enables you to control some of the 68following (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 76Wireless 77******** 78 79With regards to wireless, all acer-wmi does is enable the radio on the card. It 80is not responsible for the wireless LED - once the radio is enabled, this is 81down to the wireless driver for your card. So the behaviour of the wireless LED, 82once you enable the radio, will depend on your hardware and driver combination. 83 84e.g. With the BCM4318 on the Acer Aspire 5020 series: 85 86ndiswrapper: Light blinks on when transmitting 87b43: Solid light, blinks off when transmitting 88 89Wireless radio control is unconditionally enabled - all Acer laptops that support 90acer-wmi come with built-in wireless. However, should you feel so inclined to 91ever wish to remove the card, or swap it out at some point, please get in touch 92with me, as we may well be able to gain some data on wireless card detection. 93 94The wireless radio is exposed through rfkill. 95 96Bluetooth 97********* 98 99For bluetooth, this is an internal USB dongle, so once enabled, you will get 100a USB device connection event, and a new USB device appears. When you disable 101bluetooth, you get the reverse - a USB device disconnect event, followed by the 102device disappearing again. 103 104Bluetooth is autodetected by acer-wmi, so if you do not have a bluetooth module 105installed in your laptop, this file won't exist (please be aware that it is 106quite common for Acer not to fit bluetooth to their laptops - so just because 107you have a bluetooth button on the laptop, doesn't mean that bluetooth is 108installed). 109 110For the adventurously minded - if you want to buy an internal bluetooth 111module off the internet that is compatible with your laptop and fit it, then 112it will work just fine with acer-wmi. 113 114Bluetooth is exposed through rfkill. 115 1163G 117** 118 1193G is currently not autodetected, so the 'threeg' file is always created under 120sysfs. So far, no-one in possession of an Acer laptop with 3G built-in appears to 121have tried Linux, or reported back, so we don't have any information on this. 122 123If you have an Acer laptop that does have a 3G card in, please contact me so we 124can properly detect these, and find out a bit more about them. 125 126To read the status of the 3G card (0=off, 1=on): 127cat /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 128 129To enable the 3G card: 130echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 131 132To disable the 3G card: 133echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/threeg 134 135To set the state of the 3G card when loading acer-wmi, pass: 136threeg=X (where X is 0 or 1) 137 138Mail LED 139******** 140 141This can be found in most older Acer laptops supported by acer-wmi, and many 142newer ones - it is built into the 'mail' button, and blinks when active. 143 144On newer (WMID) laptops though, we have no way of detecting the mail LED. If 145your laptop identifies itself in dmesg as a WMID model, then please try loading 146acer_acpi with: 147 148force_series=2490 149 150This will use a known alternative method of reading/ writing the mail LED. If 151it works, please report back to me with the DMI data from your laptop so this 152can be added to acer-wmi. 153 154The LED is exposed through the LED subsystem, and can be found in: 155 156/sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/leds/acer-wmi::mail/ 157 158The mail LED is autodetected, so if you don't have one, the LED device won't 159be registered. 160 161Backlight 162********* 163 164The backlight brightness control is available on all acer-wmi supported 165hardware. The maximum brightness level is usually 15, but on some newer laptops 166it's 10 (this is again autodetected). 167 168The backlight is exposed through the backlight subsystem, and can be found in: 169 170/sys/devices/platform/acer-wmi/backlight/acer-wmi/ 171 172Credits 173******* 174 175Olaf Tauber, who did the real hard work when he developed acerhk 176http://www.cakey.de/acerhk/ 177All the authors of laptop ACPI modules in the kernel, whose work 178was an inspiration in the early days of acer_acpi 179Mathieu Segaud, who solved the problem with having to modprobe the driver 180twice in acer_acpi 0.2. 181Jim Ramsay, who added support for the WMID interface 182Mark Smith, who started the original acer_acpi 183 184And the many people who have used both acer_acpi and acer-wmi. 185