Back when I started work on XDAndroid Gingerbread, I had a long list of features that were missing. One of the big entries on that list was the accelerometer. For accelerometer support, we rely on a sensors driver in the system.ext2 image that listens for events from the device.
In Gingerbread, a lot of the glue between those drivers and the Android system has changed, resulting in the incompatibilities we see now. This meant a rewrite was necessary for the driver we use. Today, I did the rewrite and got accelerometer support for Gingerbread. Those of you building from source can repo sync and get the updates now. Users will have to wait for a new system image (sorry).
The new driver is based on the HTC Passion (Nexus One) sensors driver, which is written in C++. The driver uses a few simple classes to do the heavy lifting, so the end result is a very manageable, simple and easy to understand driver. Down the line, we can also add proper proximity sensor support to the driver for Rhodium.
For developers and advanced users, the driver now resides in our device/xdandroid tree to follow upstream conventions. Please see the relevant commit for reference (and ignore the GPS change which I accidentally stuck in BoardConfig).
Thanks for reading!