backlight: Expose brightness curve type through sysfs

Backlight brightness curves can have different shapes. The two main
types are linear and non-linear curves. The human eye doesn't
perceive linearly increasing/decreasing brightness as linear (see
also 88ba95bedb79 "backlight: pwm_bl: Compute brightness of LED
linearly to human eye"), hence many backlights use non-linear (often
logarithmic) brightness curves. The type of curve currently is opaque
to userspace, so userspace often uses more or less reliable heuristics
(like the number of brightness levels) to decide whether to treat a
backlight device as linear or non-linear.

Export the type of the brightness curve via the new sysfs attribute
'scale'. The value of the attribute can be 'linear', 'non-linear' or
'unknown'. For devices that don't provide information about the scale
of their brightness curve the value of the 'scale' attribute is 'unknown'.

Signed-off-by: Matthias Kaehlcke <mka@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Daniel Thompson <daniel.thompson@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Lee Jones <lee.jones@linaro.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/backlight.h b/include/linux/backlight.h
index 0b5897446dca..c7d6b2e8c3b5 100644
--- a/include/linux/backlight.h
+++ b/include/linux/backlight.h
@@ -46,6 +46,12 @@ enum backlight_notification {
 	BACKLIGHT_UNREGISTERED,
 };
 
+enum backlight_scale {
+	BACKLIGHT_SCALE_UNKNOWN = 0,
+	BACKLIGHT_SCALE_LINEAR,
+	BACKLIGHT_SCALE_NON_LINEAR,
+};
+
 struct backlight_device;
 struct fb_info;
 
@@ -80,6 +86,8 @@ struct backlight_properties {
 	enum backlight_type type;
 	/* Flags used to signal drivers of state changes */
 	unsigned int state;
+	/* Type of the brightness scale (linear, non-linear, ...) */
+	enum backlight_scale scale;
 
 #define BL_CORE_SUSPENDED	(1 << 0)	/* backlight is suspended */
 #define BL_CORE_FBBLANK		(1 << 1)	/* backlight is under an fb blank event */