Re: [PATCH 0/5][RFC] Physical PCI slot objects

Alex Chiang
2007-11-13T20:36:58Z

* Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>:
>
> Ok, again, I want to see the IBM people sign off on this, after
> testing on all of their machines, before I'll consider this, as
> I know the IBM acpi tables are "odd".

Who would be a good contact at IBM to get some eyes / machine
time on this?

> Also, how about Dell machines? I know they are probably not
> expecting this information to show up and who knows if the
> numbering of their slots match up with their physical diagrams

Who would be a good contact at Dell for the same?

I don't have as much experience with oddball firmware from
various vendors as others on this list, but given the rather
stable definition of _SUN in the ACPI spec, I'd be surprised to
see vendors abusing that method. [I fully accept the possibility
that I'm just naive ;)]

More likely, a vendor will do what the HP Proliant folks did,
that being simply omitting a _SUN method altogether.

One more thought on that -- at *worst* my patch series will do no
worse than the status quo of what the acpiphp module is doing
today. That module walks through the namespace looking for _SUN
methods, and when it finds them, it creates an entry in exactly
the same spot (/sys/bus/pci/slots/N) that my patch series does.

What this series adds beyond acpiphp is adding entries for slots
that aren't hotpluggable.

> IBM sells a program that does this for server rooms. It's
> probably part of some Tivoli package somewhere, sorry I don't
> remember the name. I did see it working many years ago and it
> required no kernel changes at all to work properly.

Like I said in an earlier email, HP ia64 systems will require a
kernel change to get this information. Whether it comes via a
generic ACPI access layer like dev_acpi, or something like this
patch series, the kernel will still get touched.

Thanks.

/ac