Hi Robert, On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:09:54 -0600, Robert Hancock wrote: > It's quite possible that the BIOS accesses the device either from ACPI > AML or possibly even from SMI. In that case it would be quite reasonable > for the BIOS to reserve that region to prevent another driver from > loading and trying to take conflicting control of the device. One has to > be careful before assuming that any such reservation is bogus. Again I am all for honoring such BIOS requests so as to prevent conflicts between ACPI or SMI and native drivers. The problem is that no two BIOS out there do the same in this respect. I couldn't see any correlation between machines declaring their hwmon device in PNP and machines where ACPI or SMI access the device in question. Many boards declare their device and seemingly never touch it so it's fine for Linux to drive them. Some boards no not declare the devices but still access them in our back. Thomas' patches should deal with the ACPI AML case in most cases, but not with SMI. So either the PNP code in Linux isn't exporting enough details to differentiate, or even the PNP code has no way to tell these cases apart. In the latter case there's not much we can do. In the former case, let's have the PNP code export the information so that hwmon drivers can decide whether they should bind to the devices or not by default. -- Jean Delvare
