pommed v1.23: full late 2008 laptops support

pommed v1.23 is out, with full support for the late 2008 laptops.

The LCD backlight inner workings got figured out finally, but there’s a catch: the backlight won’t react to the settings when running X11 with the proprietary nVidia drivers on the MacBook5,1 and the MacBookAir2,1. It works fine on the MacBookPro5,1 and it works fine on all three machines with the opensource nouveau driver. Switching to the console before setting the backlight and then back to X does work as a workaround.

So there’s something up with the proprietary nVidia driver, and my uneducated guess is that the MacBook Pro may somehow be exempt from the issue due to its dual GPU config.

I’ve also switched the nVidia machines to using the generic sysfs backlight driver in pommed. This driver has been there for some time for the PowerPC machines, so now it’s part of the generic pommed code. You need the mbp_nvidia_bl driver in your kernel for this to work.

Don’t panic! If you don’t have it, pommed will fall back to the native driver (nv8600mgt) and everything will work just as before. Pommed will tell you if it has to fall back to the native driver, so check your logs if you want to know.

This release of pommed needs testing on all nVidia machines: MacBookPro3,1, MacBookPro4,1, MacBookPro5,1, MacBook5,1 and MacBookAir2,1. If anything doesn’t work, tell me about it and I’ll fix it.