Making Fedora work with laptops on docking station with external monitor

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 02:27:27PM -0400, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> On 10/05/2010 02:25 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > The range of ways that lid switches can be broken is large. One machine 
> > I've seen tries to read from a GPIO that's off by 16, because Intel's 
> > GPIO/GPE numbering is complicated. Another generates an event on lid 
> > close and generates a different event on lid open, but there's no 
> > handler for the open event and so the state variable never gets updated. 
> > The world is full of bad hardware and the kernel can't always be there 
> > to shield userspace from reality.
> 
> Of course, but where possible it should sanitize.  Userspace is like a
> teenager, you expose them to just enough reality to know what's out
> there, but in general they have no idea just how scary it really is. :)

And it's not possible to sanitise in 100% of cases here, so userspace 
has to cope with the breakage. And if userspace has to cope, there's no 
point in sanitising any of it.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org