Tabletkiosk Sahara Backlight Linux Kernel Module

The original module

To control the backlight of the Tabletkiosk Sahara Touch-iT i213 from Linux, I received from the manufacturer a zip file containing a tar file with the source for a kernel module and a tar file with the source for a simple GUI. While the GUI does not mention copyrights or license, the kernel module tar contains a copy of the Gnu Public License.

The kernel module can be built on its own and used following these instructions:

1. unpack the package via tar xvzf kb3886.tar.gz
2. have kernel sources installed and ready compiled , ideally under /usr/src/linux
3. cd into the kb3886 and build the module via make
4. this then should result in a kb3886.ko  which then gets installed via make install
5. load the "parent" modules backlight and the new kb3886 via modprobe backlight; modprobe kb3886
6. this then results in a interface where we can read and write to with any app at /sys/class/backlight/kb3886/
7. for your test sudo bash -c 'echo "20" > /sys/class/backlight/kb3886/brightness' will turn the backlight very dim and sudo bash -c 'echo "255" > /sys/class/backlight/kb3886/brightness' will turn the backlight to 100% !

My updated version

I want to try to include this driver into the linux kernel source. For this I took a look at similar driver in the drivers/video/backlight/ directory of the linux 2.6.19-rc1 kernel source, especially the corgi_bl.c.

I later updated the patch to work with a more current version.

This is the patch against the git version of 2007-07-22.

This is the kernel configuration I made including support for my backlight module and the touchscreen module.

I have made a rebuild script which I could at to cron, so it will update the kernel source every day from git and build a kernel to verify if the patch still applies cleanly.