Re: obtaining acpi details outside of drivers/acpi

[Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.demon.co.uk>]

On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 14:53 +0100, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 09:22 -0400, Len Brown wrote:
> > On Thursday 06 September 2007 07:47, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> > 
> > > Mmm. It seems acpi_video_bus_check() is static and therefore not
> > > available outside of video.c
> > > 
> > > > BTW. I'm curious what you are trying to do.
> > > > There is actually quite a bit of movement in this code right now.
> > > 
> > > Think about fbdev drivers (or some video driver).... Rather than
> > > bang on the hardware to try and do auto-detection of devices, it's much
> > > easier (and sometimes required) to just ask the system BIOS via ACPI to
> > > see what devices are available.
> > > 
> > > I want to parse _DOD myself to see what's available in kernel space.
> > 
> > It would be good to have this code in only one place
> > and export it from there to other parts of the kernel that need it.
> > I'd like to be able to not have fbdev drivers depend on the acpi video driver,
> > so perhaps we could have some generic interface where fbdev is the consumer
> > and in this case acpi/video.c is the provider?
> 
> That sounds good. I'm open to suggestions on interface.

I'm willing to help define this though, so I don't expect anyone to just
throw something over the wall. 

> But is there anything better available now to scan the namespace in
> current released kernels for _DOD ?

Oh, and if not, not to worry. I'll stick with the fixed namespace check
for now, until we can define the interface above.

Thanks Len!

Alan.