On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> On 27 Feb 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> > I know windows can do it. I saw it last week. So I'm going to keep
> > digging.
>
> This is a good point. Somehow windows knows when to ignore the bios, and
> when not to. It's interesting to see it go, and it gives linux a bad
> reputation. I've seen it happen.
I think this is because of ACPI. There is a specification from Micorsoft
- called "The Simple Boot Flag Specification" - that "can be used by an
operating system to communicate boot options to the system BIOS and add-in
card option ROMs". This specification is here:
(http://microsoft.com/hwdev/desinit/simp_bios.htm)
Unfortunately, it's in rtf format.
And, unfortunately, Linux doesn't take into account that ACPI table when
it boots.
And, more so, I haven't seen anything in the way of ACPI in linuxbios yet.
That brings up a couple of things.
One is that Linux is (slowly) getting more ACPI aware. It will be a long
while before it can take advantage of all the ACPI capabilities in a
system, including boot flags, PCI routing tables, and interrupt handling
tables. But, it is something that is on some people's radar for future
versions of Linux (e.g. 2.5+).
Another is the thought of ACPI support in linuxbios. As mentioned before,
i haven't seen anything, though I could be missing something. Are there
any thoughts of supporting it? Or looking into it?
For those that don't know anything about ACPI, I recommend getting
familiar with it. It's offical website is:
http://www.teleport.com/~acpi/
Download and read the 2.0 spec. It's a monster, but for practical
purposes, most of it (the ASL and AML references) can be ignored for the
time being.
If there are any questions, I'll be happy to field them as best I can.
-pat
