On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 01:04:26PM -0600, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Andi Kleen wrote:
However you'll likely need ACPI for other reasons anyways, e.g. for better power saving.
bummer. What the BIOS vendors are doing (to lock in proprietary BIOS, some say) is making ACPI tables copyright the BIOS vendor, not the motherboard vendor. So LinuxBIOS will have to reverse engineer their own, somehow.
You don't need full support, many of it is optional and will fall back to the old methods if not available. e.g. you can probably leave out most of the PCI support if you don't want to support PCI hotplug. Longer term it might be needed again for power management though.
Doing PST objects for power saving shouldn't be that difficult, but you need knowledge of the CPUs from their data sheet (and some testing if the power regulators on the mobo can take all the transitions) But it shouldn't be very motherboard specific.
However that said there is a lot of useful information in the FADT and some other tables and I definitely plan to use more of it in the future.
-Andi