Re: Dell Media Direct button

[Robert Millan]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:57:22AM +0200, Per Öberg wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Some laptops, e.g., from Dell have a special button that they use to
> boot a special embedded OS for media only instead of the ordinary OS.
> 
> For my Dell XPS1330M I can determine if the Media button was pressed by
> first writing 0xf9 to port 0x70 and then testing bit 0x08 of port 0x71.
> 
> It would be really nice if such a test could be enabled in grub so that
> grub can go directly to a specific menu alternative without showing the
> gui if the media button was pressed.
> 
> Is this interesting? I'd like to contribute but I don't know where to start.

Sounds interesting, but this needs some thought on how to design it.

I suppose what you want is change the 'default' variable.  Perhaps increase
it by 1?  But then, where do you do this?  grub_machine_init is too early as
'default' hasn't been set yet.

Maybe we could have a global 'int default_offset' variable that is initialized
in grub_machine_init and later on used by normal.mod?

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."