FreeBSD release Acer Aspire 5735Z

[Anthony Jenkins]

>________________________________

>From: Lars Engels <lars.engels at 0x20.net>
>To: Anthony Jenkins <scoobi_doo at yahoo.com>
>Cc: Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org>; "irek-kaenly at yandex.ru" <irek-kaenly at yandex.ru>; Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de>; "freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org" <freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org>
>Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 9:24 AM
>Subject: Re: FreeBSD release Acer Aspire 5735Z
>
>On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 05:42:04AM -0700, Anthony Jenkins wrote:
>> >________________________________
>> >From: Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org>
>> >To: Lars Engels <lars.engels at 0x20.net>
>> >Cc: irek-kaenly at yandex.ru; Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de>; freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
>> >Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 9:38 AM
>> >Subject: Re: FreeBSD release Acer Aspire 5735Z
>> >
>> >On 29 October 2011 21:08, Lars Engels <lars.engels at 0x20.net> wrote:
>> >
>> >> And cross your fingers that the button to enable / disable wireless
>> >> works out of the box. Unfortunately there's no port of Linux' acer_acpi
>> >> [1] to FreeBSD.
>> >>
>> >> [1] http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/
>> >
>> >Please please please, can someone port this?
>> 
>> Looks like this was already ported to acpi_wmi(4) some time ago (or at least 
>> formed the basis for acpi_wmi(4)), but I can't load it on my Acer Aspire 5552 without panicking the kernel - seems it tries to construct two 
>> cdevs with the same name.  Looking into a patch now, just to see what it does.
>
>I loaded apci_wmi on an Acer notebook and /dev/wmistat was created.
>Using cat(1) I was presented a table of three GUIDs. Google told me that
>one of them represented the Wireless / Bluetooth state.


I had to modify the driver to create /dev/wmistat%d instances for the two interfaces it detected on my laptop.  cat(1)'ing each shows a single GUID entry.  My laptop model is not listed in the Linux acer_acpi supported hardware, but this laptop is the first one that has had almost *everything* supported by FreeBSD - ACPI suspend/resume, wireless Atheros NIC (thanks Adrian!), SATA HDD, etc.  So I apparently don't even need acpi_wmi(4)...


>But what to do then? acpi_wmi's manpage only says that it can only read
>the values via wmistat, but not how to alter them.

Maybe that functionality is what needs to be ported to FreeBSD :-)  I'll go that route.

Anthony

>> 
>> ...and I had just downloaded the Linux kernel sources to try my hand at a port (acer_acpi lives in the Linux kernel now). What is the current procedure (if any) for porting GPL'd stuff to BSD?
>> 
>> 
>> Anthony
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> >Adrian
>> 
>
>
>