On Tuesday 17 November 2009 08:41:55 pm ykzhao wrote: > a. One is to add the support of detection IPMI system interface in > ACPI namespace, which is a complement of ACPI SPMI detection. This is not related to your current patch, which adds namespace detection. This is a new conversation about how I think we should make future changes in IPMI device discovery. The ACPI namespace is the canonical way to enumerate devices that don't have a native enumeration protocol. I think the only reason the SPMI table exists at all is to allow an OS to find an IPMI system interface during early boot, before the OS is prepared to parse the ACPI namespace. Anything described by the SPMI should also be described in the namespace. Linux does not need to use IPMI during that early boot phase, so I think the SPMI detection should be dropped completely, and we should rely *only* on the ACPI namespace and the PCI enumeration. We may have to use SPMI or SMBIOS to work around BIOS defects, but we shouldn't use them in general. I have been told that Windows is similar in that it does not use IPMI during early boot, and that it does not look at the SPMI table at all, so I think relying on the namespace would be fairly safe. Bjorn -- 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
