patch for toshiba acpi

[James Earl]

On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 19:34, edscott wilson garcia wrote:
> I finally got the lcd brightness control and force-fan to work on a
> toshiba 2455 on FreeBSD 5.1. If anybody is interested, you can find the
> patch at http://linux.imp.mx/toshiba/
> 
> In to use it, apply patch and recompile acpi.ko module and copy to
> /boot/kernel. Once rebooted, sysctl will see two new variables:
> hw.acpi.toshiba.lcd_brightness
> hw.acpi.toshiba.force_fan
> 
> lcd_brightness has eight values (0-7) and force fan two values (0-1).
> 
> Finally I can dim the screen and get rid of this headache...
> 
> Edscott Wilson Garcia

I'm going to have to give this a try on my Satellite A10!

This is a related issue, perhaps you may know the answer... my A10 will
dim and brighten the display based on a "battery save mode" BIOS
setting, and depending on whether or not the AC power adapter is plugged
in to the machine.

There are other system settings which are supposed to change along with
the display brightness.  For example, here are the options shown in the
BIOS system setup:

BATTERY:
Battery Save Mode = Low Power
- Processing Speed = Low
- CPU Sleep Mode = Enabled
- Display Auto Off = 03Min.
- HDD Auto Off = 03Min.
- LCD Brightness = Semi-Bright
- Cooling Method = Battery Optimized

This seems to work right up until the FreeBSD kernel loads.  Do your
BIOS settings include a similar setting?  Would it be possible for
someone to write a patch that would make the FreeBSD ACPI to allow these
settings to work?

I don't know very much about the workings of the FreeBSD ACPI, but I'm
trying to learn, and am very curious to know why this works the way it
does.  :)