Some hardware has resource allocation difficulties on *BSD. My Acer Aspire 3680, for instance, has a buggy BIOS that clears resources for the ethernet and wifi hardware when ACPI is enabled, preventing BSD operating systems from using that hardware - I have to choose between ACPI support and ethernet (and I don't have APM). Issues like this seem to be fairly common on laptops.
(What I've heard about this insofar as it applies to FreeBSD is this, from FreeBSD's John Baldwin: "Your devices are there, they just can't allocate resources. This is more of a FreeBSD bug in that we don't support fully allocating I/O port and memio resources for PCI devices from scratch, at least we don't handle allocating resources from scratch for devices behind PCI-PCI bridges.") I'd like to ask, does DragonflyBSD have any plans for introducing hardware resource allocation to the kernel, instead of relying entirely on the BIOS for that? If not, can I suggest it as a potentially useful thing to add? I realize it would be a rather radical departure from standard BSDisms, but it would make laptop support a lot better... Also, it just strikes me as rather wise in this age of buggy proprietary BIOSes to rely on the BIOS as little as reasonably possible. (Sorry if I'm not making any sense, I'm very unfamiliar with the terminology involved. What I know thus far is just that the BIOS can allocate and clear certain sorts of resources that *BSD can't, and that buggy BIOS behavior results in *BSD not being able to use certain hardware on my laptop.)
