[LinuxBIOS] HPET and ACPI

[Jon Smirl]

I have a bunch of Dell servers around here that have chipsets
supporting HPET (like ICH5) but they don't have the HPET ACPI entry. I
have talked to Dell technical support and this is because no Microsoft
OS uses HPET.

At boot Linux looks for the HPET ACPI entry to know if there is HPET
support. Of course on my Dell machines it says there isn't any.

What is involved in the HPET ACPI entry? Would it be easy to modify
the kernel to look for this device without the entry?