Making Fedora work with laptops on docking station with external monitor

[Nathaniel McCallum]

On 10/05/2010 02:25 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 02:18:20PM -0400, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> 
>> Agreed, the hardware may lie, but the kernel is the arbiter of truth, at
>> least in this case.
> 
> 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. :)

Nathaniel