Hi! > > Ok. You are right that ACPI is an ugly piece of mess. But I'm pretty > > sure that 90%+ of ACPI notebook implementations *will* want to talk to > > their monitoring chips... for temperature readings. > > > > So even if we fixed ACPI to reserve the ports, you'd be still unhappy; > > lm-sensors would break at least on all the notebooks. > > That's a secondary problem. The primary issue is the concurrent access > to resources, which cause lots of trouble which are hard to investigate. > If ACPI reserves the ports, then the SMBus or hardware monitoring > drivers (or any other conflicting driver) will cleanly fail to load, > which would be a move in the right direction. Ideally we would be able > to synchronize the accesses between ACPI and the other drivers, but if > we can't, I'd already be _very happy_ to just prevent conflicting > drivers from being loaded at the same time. > > So, can ACPI actually reserve the ports it accesses? No idea, talk to Len Brown (or start reading the code) :-(. I don't think it will be easy. > > > 1* As far as I know, we currently have no way to know if the ACPI code > > > plans to ever access the hardware monitoring chip. If the acpi > > > subsystem could export this information somehow, it would help a lot. > > > But I'm not familiar with ACPI, so I don't know if this is feasable or > > > not. We just can't prevent the SMBus and hardware monitoring drivers > > > drivers from being loaded as soon as ACPI is enabled. This would > > > prevent a majority of users from using them, while they work fine for > > > most of them. > > > > What about whitelist? DMI-based? That's only way to do it, I'm afraid. > > What kind of whitelist do you have in mind? We can't realistically > maintain an ever-growing whitelist of hundreds of entries in the > kernel. We could block all laptops by default and maintain a white list > only for them, and a black list for other systems, the would probably > limit the maintenance work, maybe not to an acceptable level though. I'm afraid something like that is way to go. Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-acpi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
