thinkpad-acpi: rework brightness support

Refactor and redesign the brightness control backend...

In order to fix bugzilla #11750...

Add a new brightness control mode: support direct NVRAM checkpointing
of the backlight level (i.e. store directly to NVRAM without the need
for UCMS calls), and use that together with the EC-based control.
Disallow UCMS+EC, thus avoiding races with the SMM firmware.

Switch the models that define HBRV (EC Brightness Value) in the DSDT
to the new mode.  These are: T40-T43, R50-R52, R50e, R51e, X31-X41.

Change the default for all other IBM ThinkPads to UCMS-only.  The
Lenovo models already default to UCMS-only.

Reported-by: Alexey Fisher <bug-track@fisher-privat.net>
Signed-off-by: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@hmh.eng.br>
Signed-off-by: Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/laptops/thinkpad-acpi.txt b/Documentation/laptops/thinkpad-acpi.txt
index 25ed43d0a21f..3d7650768bb5 100644
--- a/Documentation/laptops/thinkpad-acpi.txt
+++ b/Documentation/laptops/thinkpad-acpi.txt
@@ -1157,10 +1157,15 @@ display backlight brightness control methods have 16 levels, ranging
 from 0 to 15.
 
 There are two interfaces to the firmware for direct brightness control,
-EC and CMOS.  To select which one should be used, use the
+EC and UCMS (or CMOS).  To select which one should be used, use the
 brightness_mode module parameter: brightness_mode=1 selects EC mode,
-brightness_mode=2 selects CMOS mode, brightness_mode=3 selects both EC
-and CMOS.  The driver tries to auto-detect which interface to use.
+brightness_mode=2 selects UCMS mode, brightness_mode=3 selects EC
+mode with NVRAM backing (so that brightness changes are remembered
+across shutdown/reboot).
+
+The driver tries to select which interface to use from a table of
+defaults for each ThinkPad model.  If it makes a wrong choice, please
+report this as a bug, so that we can fix it.
 
 When display backlight brightness controls are available through the
 standard ACPI interface, it is best to use it instead of this direct
@@ -1498,6 +1503,7 @@ to enable more than one output class, just add their values.
 				(bluetooth, WWAN, UWB...)
 	0x0008			HKEY event interface, hotkeys
 	0x0010			Fan control
+	0x0020			Backlight brightness
 
 There is also a kernel build option to enable more debugging
 information, which may be necessary to debug driver problems.