The current code does not follow Intel documentation: It misses some things
and does other, undocumented things. This causes wrong backlight values in
certain conditions. Instead of adding tricky code handling badly documented
and rare corner cases, don't handle combination mode specially at all. This
way PCI_LBPC is never touched and weird things shouldn't happen.
If combination mode is enabled, then the only downside is that changing the
brightness has a greater granularity (the LBPC value), but LBPC is at most
254 and the maximum is in the thousands, so this is no real functional loss.
A potential problem with not handling combined mode is that a brightness of
max * PCI_LBPC is not bright enough. However, this is very unlikely because
from the documentation LBPC seems to act as a scaling factor and doesn't look
like it's supposed to be changed after boot. The value at boot should always
result in a bright enough screen.
IMPORTANT: However, although usually the above is true, it may not be when
people ran an older (2.6.37) kernel which messed up the LBPC register, and
they are unlucky enough to have a BIOS that saves and restores the LBPC value.
Then a good kernel may seem to not work: Max brightness isn't bright enough.
If this happens people should boot back into the old kernel, set brightness
to the maximum, and then reboot. After that everything should be fine.
For more information see the below links. This fixes bugs:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23472http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25072
Signed-off-by: Indan Zupancic <indan@nul.nu>
Tested-by: Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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