Linux 3.17 Will Detect If Your Toshiba Laptop Is Falling Down

The x86 platform driver updates were sent in on Saturday by Matthew Garrett and besides some clean-ups and various quirks / minor additions for new devices, there's a new driver for generating falling laptop events for Toshiba laptops.

Similar to the Linux 3.16 feature of a driver to detect if Dell Latitude laptops are in a free-fall (and formerly the HP driver), there's now driver support for Toshiba.

The new "Toshiba HDD Active Protection Sensor" driver is for the accelerometer found in recent Toshiba laptops (HID TOS620A). The driver receives an ACPI notify event when the sensor detects a sudden movement or harsh vibration and then another ACPI event when the movement/vibration has passed.

This driver also exposes via sysfs the ability to get/set the intended sensitivity/protection level. As with the other laptop free-fall drivers, the intended use of this driver is to be able to stall/protect the hard drive in the case of the laptop falling.

Keith Packard, and others, wishing there was a beer protection sensor for laptops to prevent spilling a beer on your laptop at the next conference or in the office...

The Toshiba active protection sensor driver is expected to land via this pull request for Linux 3.17.