Re: [patch 2/2] ia64: add driver for ACPI methods to call native firmware

Bjorn Helgaas
2007-09-12T16:50:27Z

On Wednesday 12 September 2007 02:56:51 am Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 05:16:46PM -0600, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> > +config IA64_HP_AML_NFW
> > + tristate "Support ACPI AML calls to native firmware"
>
> The description seems a bit generic for something that's HP specific?

Thanks, I'll wordsmith the description a bit. There's actually nothing
in the implementation that prevents this from working on non-HP firmware.

I really want feedback on the best approach of:

1. Always build the driver static, accept the additional 4600 bytes
in everybody's image, not export anything.

2. Allow building driver as a module, export sal_lock. This would
also enable building arch/ia64/kernel/esi.c as a module.

3. Allow building driver as a module, restructure SAL_CALL so we
don't have to export sal_lock, but we do export fw_call_lock()
(as done in these patches). This isn't quite sufficient to
enable building esi.c as a module.

#1 would be easiest, of course, but I'm not happy about adding stuff
that is only used on HP hardware. #2 would be simple, but exporting
sal_lock has been resisted in the past.

Bjorn