On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Peter Stuge peter@stuge.se wrote:
An area where I need something explained (that I didn't found in the wiki) is: what would be required to have ACPI working ?
Couldn't we extract the tables from legacy BIOS and use them within coreboot, if we don't stuff them in svn we should be fine.
No, you would be fine, noone else. We can't redistribute ACPI tables from the factory BIOS.
I explicitely said they wouldn't be redistributed, just as the linux kernel can have an updated DSDT to boot with, we could certainly allow the load of external ACPI tables. But we wouldn't need to distribute them.
And a coreboot using them could probably be argued to be a derivative work of the factory BIOS, and that is not so good from a licensing perspective.
That would be subject to local copyright laws, I think, and providing a way to load external ACPI tables would not be a problem in itself.
What the final user does with his right or behind his closed doors has no relationship with the fact that we allow to load external files.
Because we could certainly create the tables from scratch ourselves if we would like... (OK that would certainly be hard, but still...)
What would be cool, is an option in the coreboot build process to use the ACPI tools to extract tables from the running legacy BIOS and stuff them in the image being built. But would that be technically possible ?