From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> To: andrew.grover@intel.com (Grover, Andrew) Subject: Re: ACPI fundamental locking problems Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 20:08:12 +0100 (BST) Cc: jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com ('Jeff Garzik'), linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org (Linux Kernel Mailing List), torvalds@transmeta.com (Linus Torvalds), acpi@phobos.fachschaften.tu-muenchen.de ("Acpi-linux (E-mail)") > We're depending on vendors (aka the BIOS) for all the ACPI tables, as well > as every other piece of a priori data we need to boot the OS. They have had enough problems getting simpler API's right. The ACPI spec is bloated, complex, and very hard to follow - and its written in my native language. I really do not envy a random BIOS writers task. > Could I please ask that you at least show me a system where this is a > problem before throwing out all the work we've done on ACPI because of this > technical nit? The goal isnt a technical nit, its to avoid loading 300Kbytes of crud (which should mostly be in user space anyway) on the 99.9% of machines where we dont need it. The user space thing isnt an idle comment btw, its something that I think we should actively pursue for 2.5. By making better use of initrd and the clean ramfsroot stuff Al wants to do we can push a lot of stuff (bootp, dhcp, dmi based configuration fixups, acpi) almost entirely into user space. That makes me a lot lot happier. The fact that it takes more code to parse and interpret ACPI than it does to route traffic on the internet backbones should be a hint something is badly wrong either in ACPI the spec, ACPI the implenentation or both. Reading the code I can find some examples of pointless code bloat, but not enough to convince me the broken part isnt the spec. Alan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/