The p-Code Machine

HP has a laptop diskdrive protection system similar to IBM’s hdaps. It’s called HP 3D DriveGuard (and possibly had other names in the past). The problem with these systems is that they are mostly software based, they consist of two parts, a general purpose accelerometer (usually with freefall detection), and software to monitor the accelerometer’s freefall detection, and swiftly park the disk when the laptop is considered to be in freefall.

Ubuntu Jaunty’s kernel was already capable of reading my laptops accelerometer (lis3lv02d), but back then there was no software to actually park the disk. In the meanwhile this seems to have been solved: a simple piece of code (hpfall.c) has been included in the kernel, as an example of how to do this. The code is very basic, but should work. I haven’t really tested it yet, by dropping my laptop onto the floor… But I have packaged the code, including a (nice) init script. It’s available for Karmic on my PPA, the package is appropriately called hpfall, use at own risk though.