Re: Using NetBSD on a z50

["elijah rutschman" <elijahr%gmail.com@localhost>]

> >> The power button seems to put it to sleep, but the backlight remains
> >> on.  Is this normal?  Or is there a more correct way to put it to
> >> sleep during travel.
> > this is normal.  It's a limitation of the z50 hardware.  Only Wince
> > can fully suspend it properly, because (as I vaguely remember) the
> > power button sends a hardware interrupt or something that jumps to a
> > specific point on the ROM, which is Wince.
>
> This doesn't sound right to me.  Wince must pass it back to NetBSD,
> because the kernel prints something when I push the power button.  So
> why can't NetBSD do whatever it wants then?
>
> I think more likely it's just that NetBSD doesn't (yet) know how to
> make the hardware turn off the backlight.  (There's a bit in an include
> file that looks promising; someday, I mean to go poking around....)

In the past, I have been led to believe that certain power management
functionality is simply not possible outside of WinCE, due to the way
that WinCE on the ROM is married to the chipset.  If one could get
NetBSD on the ROM, maybe things would be different. I could be wrong,
I don't really know what I am talking about.  When I asked a similar
question, I was given an answer like this.

Refer to http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-hpcmips/2006/03/06/0001.html
regarding the power management.  It discusses the MobilePro, but I'm
assuming that the z50 has a very similar architecture.

Refer to http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-hpcmips/2006/03/21/0000.html
for discussion about the LCD brightness control for the z50.  It seems
to suggest that it is possible to turn off the backlight, but would
require some programming.

Also, Scott, are you sure you are using the generic kernel, and not
the installation kernel?  You mentioned manually unzipping the NetBSD
tarballs to make your installation, so I'm guessing there is a
possibility you are still using the installation kernel to boot with.
It may be that the z50's backlight is now supported in the NetBSD
kernel, but the feature may have been excluded from compilation in the
installation kernel.  Just a thought.

And a good resource for the z50 lives at
http://webpages.charter.net/dbarnes3367/PC/Z50/
See the section on Hardware.

Cheers,
Elijah