Re: [PATCH 0/2] ACPI: Re-factor and remove ./drivers/acpi/atomicio.[ch]

[Thomas Renninger <trenn@suse.de>]

On Monday, October 31, 2011 04:51:07 PM Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 4:33 AM, Thomas Renninger <trenn@suse.de> wrote:

> Seems like these are BIOS bugs.  Do we know for sure that Windows
> consumes this information that seems to be wrong?  Have you had a
> conversation with the vendor about whether the BIOS is at fault here?
Such closed specifications between a major OS and specific HW vendors
should be forbidden by law and I expect in some countries you'll win
if you contest this contract in a high enough court...
APEI is based on the Windows WHEA specification which only specific
vendors can retrieve from Windows if they sign an NDA contract.
I could imagine there you find details about the GAS structure usage
in WHEA/APEI tables the way Windows like it.

After looking at quite a lot APEI tables and their bit width, byte access
and mask values, I am pretty sure bit width is ignored on Windows.
Or say, if these tables are used, access width is always correct while
bit width is not.
 
> If we make Linux ignore the bit_width, that might "fix" these boxes
> with broken BIOSes, but at the cost of breaking a box that uses
> bit_width correctly.
None of the "broken bit width" boxes I looked at should break if
access width is used.

   Thomas