On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 03:01:01PM -0700, Bjorn Helgaas wrote: > On Tuesday 13 November 2007 02:30:49 pm Greg KH wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 01:36:45PM -0700, Alex Chiang wrote: > > > * Greg KH <greg@xxxxxxxxx>: > > > > IBM sells a program that does this for server rooms. It's > > > > probably part of some Tivoli package somewhere, sorry I don't > > > > remember the name. I did see it working many years ago and it > > > > required no kernel changes at all to work properly. > > Do you know how this Tivoli package works or where it gets the > information? I was told it was just reading the ACPI tables from userspace. As I saw it running on a machine without a modified kernel, I had no reason to doubt this, but it might be doing something else for all I know. What I do know is that it somehow does work without any kernel changes needed, and is in use today by very large data centers without any problems. > > > Like I said in an earlier email, HP ia64 systems will require a > > > kernel change to get this information. Whether it comes via a > > > generic ACPI access layer like dev_acpi, or something like this > > > patch series, the kernel will still get touched. > > > > And like I said, I'm pretty sure you don't need to touch the kernel > > today as there are people doing this just fine from userspace without > > any kernel changes needed :) > > I think you are assuming userspace can just dump the raw ACPI tables > and extract this information from them. But I don't think that's > possible because _SUN is a method that can contain arbitrary AML. > That AML has to be *executed*, and you can't do that safely in > userspace. Yes, I was assuming that based on the above running code, if this is somehow impossible to do from userspace, I don't know what the code is doing. thanks, greg k-h - 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
