On Mon, 20 Dec 1999 02:57:16 +0100 (MET) 
 Hubert Feyrer <feyrer@rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de> wrote:

 > while porting the toshiba laptop utils to netbsd, i wonder what to do with
 > this Linux call:

Y'know, when I saw these go in, I almost gagged :-)

These are talking to the I2C bus on the Intel Power Management controller
on the PCI bus.  There are temperature sensors, GPIO pins, etc.

It would be nice to have a general set of ioctls to manipulate environmental
devices like this (ENVSYS is a good start, but need a control mechanism,
too).

Obviously, in order to effectively use this, you need to know what devices
are hooked up to the GPIO pins.

This is where model-specifc utilities (or config files for a single
set of generic utilities) come in... and they just issue the ioctls.

        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>