On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, BALBIR SINGH wrote: > > > > > ACPI seems to be supported by most of the commercial vendor > > BIOS's. Are there any plans/implementations that will support > > ACPI in LinuxBios. This is just more of please update me > > question. I am not a proponent of ACPI and not very well > > versed with it. > > What is happening in the open source universe is that ACPI is supported by > the OS, see the FreeBSD work in this area. I am not sure if Linux is as > advanced as FreeBSD, maybe someone else can comment. Linux is pretty far along. All the interpretor work is done. Other nasty details like IRQ routing are progressing nicely. There's a sourceforge site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/acpi > But we want ACPI support in the OS, not the BIOS. The firmware must provide ACPI tables for the OS to use. I've come to decide that all firmware must provide some sort of information about the hardware platform to the OS. ACPI is one means to do that, as well as doubling as a dessert topping and floor wax. Don't use ACPI. The kernel can already support various types of firmwares and tables, by default of supporting so many architectures. There is nothing wrong with making up your own format and having a kernel driver to support it. I believe that you guys have already done some work in this area... One thing that was talked about at OLS this year was a common table standard for platforms that control their own firwmare: linuxbios, some embedded PPC folk, and some arm folk. Typically, each wants to be able to tell the kernel about the devices that are on the system (feed the kernel an already constructured device tree), and resource information about some of those devices. Jeff Garzik suggested I look in this direction, as you should already have such a thing. Unfortunately, I haven't had much time.. -pat
