[OLPC-devel] Re: Why ACPI DSDT tables?

[David Woodhouse]

On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 10:55 -0600, Jordan Crouse wrote:
> I'm fairly certain that somebody is going to have to write in the ASL to
> support the embedded controllers and various peripherals anyway (I don't know
> if Quanta or provide sample code we can adapt.  AMD can give you code to
> to watch stuff hanging off of our chips, but I can't think on of any thing
> we can provide that ACPI would be interested in).

I_assume you mean that _if_ we want ACPI, we'd have to write the ASL.
Not that there's any reason we'd have to write the ASL otherwise.

> So, if all things are equal, isn't it easier for us to just write simple
> kernel drivers to talk to the devices directly rather then go through the
> effort of writing the necessary ACPI code as well as any needed BIOS or
> interpreter support?

Absolutely, yes.

> I hate writing new interfaces, but is it worth the pain of making ACPI work
> just so we don't have to do any work in the kernel to get the battery status? 

Definitely not. Even if we end up 'emulating' /proc/apm like everyone
else does, instead of taking this opportunity to fix the kernel<->user 
interface properly, it's better to do it with proper drivers.

-- 
dwmw2