RE: Linux 2.4.3-ac7

[Grover, Andrew]

> From: Martin Hamilton [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Pardon me for butting in, but perhaps this is relevant...
> 
> I've seen the odd program which manipulates the ACPI tables/registers
> directly rather than through an ASL compiler then an AML interpreter.
> These appear to use the "magic numbers" which the interpreter would
> eventually spit out.
> 
> Being a newbie on ACPI internals (still ploughing through the 400 page
> 'specification' document), I'm not sure whether there would be nasty
> implications from doing this on a larger scale - e.g. needing to tweak
> those magic numbers for each and every ACPI BIOS implementation.

(BTW, read the ACPI 2.0 spec - it's a lot better)

ACPI is meant to abstract the OS from all the "magic numbers". It's very
possible to do things in a platform-specific way, but if you want to handle
all platforms, you'd end up with something ACPI-like.

> Back in the real world, some people using ACPI BIOSes (e.g. owners of
> recent Sony Vaio boxes like my C1VE) are finding that the legacy APM
> support is losing when they try to do things like suspend to disk.  A
> minimalist ACPI implementation could be just the ticket...

We're working on this. The major issue now is device power management. 

Regards -- Andy