Re: [LinuxBIOS] x86_64: apic id lift patch

From: Ronald G Minnich
Date: Wed Nov 23 2005 - 15:25:59 EST


yhlu wrote:
sth about SRAT in LinuxBIOS, I have put SRAT dynamically support in LinuxBIOS, but the whole acpi support still need dsdt, current we only have dsdt for AMD chipset in LB. And we can not have the access the dsdt asl from Nvidia chipset yet...

yeah, this is the great thing about ACPI, it has put us into a whole new era of copyrighted stuff. ACPI tables describe hardware, and are copyright bios vendors. The question of which ACPI bits we can use in linuxbios is unresolved. AMD has committed to open-source ACPI tables, but ... what about companies like nvidia? unknown. And, to add to the fun, the mainboard vendors don't own their own ACPI tables -- the BIOS vendors do. So the mainboard vendor has their hardware design encoded into ACPI tables, which are copyright the bios vendor, not the mainboard vendor.

ACPI is a looming problem for all the open-source bios efforts out there.

I don't much like ACPI. It's just another mechanism for hiding information and limiting its distribution.

ron
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