Garrett: Why ACPI?

Posted Nov 10, 2023 13:58 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Garrett: Why ACPI? by Hunterprocrasinates
Parent article: Garrett: Why ACPI?

What about ACPI would be better handled by the OS?

ACPI is a set of data tables the OS interprets to tell it how to do useful things (like enter suspend-to-RAM state, or find the PCIe Root Complex registers). If we got rid of it, the OS would have to have all of these details hard-coded for every single platform that the OS wishes to support - and you simply wouldn't be able to boot if no-one had hard-coded the right details for your motherboard + CPU combination into the OS.

Garrett: Why ACPI?

Posted Nov 11, 2023 2:55 UTC (Sat) by Hunterprocrasinates (guest, #167806) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know why but this comment keeps magically getting deleted.

Fine you win. I don't know who to blame anymore. I'm sick of firmware bugs on other computers besides thinkpads. I Don't want to spend 7000$ on the newest linux laptop and I cant spend my money on a cheap modern computer because they are riddled with firmware bugs that affect linux.

Garrett: Why ACPI?

Posted Nov 13, 2023 12:17 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Underlying this is firmware bugs, not ACPI or UEFI issues; if we replace ACPI or UEFI with something else, you'll just get a different set of buggy firmwares.

This is clear when you look at some of the crap that got put out there for OpenFirmware systems, and for platforms without a standard firmware like the Acorn platforms; they often could only boot one OS reliably, because the firmware authors "knew" that they would only run that OS.