The input system in 2.5 is able to see the volume keys on inspiron
  notebooks w/o help from i8k.c.  This patch therefore removes the
  new code from i8kutils-1.17 for feeding those keypresses to the
  keyboard driver.

  This leaves only MODULE_PARM(restricted, "i") as the useful addition
  to what was in 2.5.58's i8k.c.  This module parm restricts control of
  the system fans to processes with CAP_SYS_ADMIN set.