candidate patches for Dell laptops and netbooks

[Domsch, Matt]

Mario Limonciello is a Dell engineer and contributor to Ubuntu.  In
particular, he's been working on making sure Dell's notebooks and
netbooks work with Ubuntu and therefore very recent kernels.  He's run
into a few fairly annoying problems, and has patches which will be
carried in the Ubuntu kernel.  He sent them to me, to see if Fedora 12
wants to pick up the same changes, or just wait until they all hit
mainline.  So I send them here, for your consideration.

1) Handling the rfkill switch on the Dell Mini {9,10,12,10v} and
Inspiron 11z netbooks.  These enable the wireless drivers to recognize
and respond to the value of the physical rfkill switch.  Without
these, if Fedora is started with the rfkill switch off, the wireless
driver loads but can't drive the hardware.  Flipping the switch on,
the driver can't respond, and wireless remains disabled.  Either a
manual modprobe -r; modprobe of the wireless driver, or a reboot is
necessary for the driver to recognize that the rfkill switch setting
is to enable wireless.

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=fff16e9927ed2632b07e782ca136da5f6048861f
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=218f25dbb86d78869a9099826a5b0a64814c5d09

2) bluetooth enable/disable work from mjg.  He's pushing a different
approach into upstream, but this enables bluetooth + rfkill in
2.6.31ish kernels.

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=c1e755f3d03c4ddc1d73e978b245921f4bce9668
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=d83364096a6fe1c3696f3cb09e40912a016e9969
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=09c7300537a8c04a2b1825520157a3618a7c9255
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=e6cc51d2e4df23fe79e29366b822e48401753b2b


3) load the dell-wmi driver on all Dell laptops.  This is a bit of a
hack, as it causes the dell-wmi driver to load, even on laptops where
it isn't necessary.  However, 2.6.31 lacks the ability to selectively
enable WMI hotkey messaging, and loading the driver on laptops where
it isn't necessary does nothing (except take a bit of memory).  WMI
hotkeys are necessary on a growing number of laptops as they are the
only method to indicate a keypress for some keys.

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=a532d8d0f73ab13075487bb5a7110de81a2508f1

Thanks,
Matt

-- 
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux