Re: [RFC] New Driver Model for 2.5

Linus Torvalds
2001-10-25T11:01:51Z

On 25 Oct 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> > That's the problem of the architecture-specific code. There is no
> > point in having a device tree for that, because it's going to be very much
> > architecture-specific anyway (ie on x86 we may have to just blindly trust
> > some silly APCI table data etc).
>
> I'm doing my best to provide a real world alternative to ACPI on some
> boards.

That will be much appreciated. ACPI is not all that wonderful to say the
least. With enough knowledge of the hardware you can mostly do a better
job (the problem is "enough knowledge", especially on most laptops where
most of the GPIO signals etc are pretty much ad-hoc and not defined by the
chipsets but by the board layout person.. And we can't query the board
revision even if they gave us the information ;)

> My perspective is coming from linuxBIOS, or in general GPL'd
> firmware, so it is a little different.

Understood.

Linus