On Sat, 23 Apr 2011, Stefan Tauner wrote:
to put this into some perspective... we (mainly twice11, xvilka, me) were discussing "the" major architectural problem of flashrom's internal programmer on irc: doing delicate stuff in user space without kernel support.
we came to the conclusion that it is worth to at least try to convince kernel people to provide interfaces for us to get more control over important things like acpi' execution and its interrupts.
I doubt if kernel people of any such distro allow userspace program to get control about acpi, but maybe they could be motivated for exposing interface which allow to issue some operation where kernel actually talk to underlying hardware but also prevents acpi or other stuff from interrupting.
Of course that would require each kernel to implement similar/overlaping set of features so abstract layer could be done so main part of flashrom code would not need know what kind of underlying kernel interface is needed. Maybe that could be done as new type internal programmer, like -p linux26 which ask kernel for proxying operations, and -p bsd44 and so on so main part and current raw access mode could remain untouched while new interface could be implemented and tested.
best regards Maciej