A subtle change in event interfaces with the new kernel

I'm finally fed up with the stock kernel 2.6.20 of Ubuntu feisty, because I want to try out the iwlwifi driver for my intel 3945 wireless card. The new kernel is 2.6.23.13, and I noticed a subtle change in event interfaces, which breaks acpi_fakekey for many special keycodes. It's when you write an "unsupported" keycode to an event device, the old kernel will take it and propagate it to all processes listening on that device, but the new kernel just ignores it, pretending nothing has happened. Here I use the term "unsupported" to refer to being unmasked by the device keybits. acpi_fakekey is doing a pretty simple job here: find the first keyboard device and write the key press/release event to it, without regard to the true capabilities of that device. Now you see how this change breaks it.