Re: [LinuxBIOS] x86_64: apic id lift patch

[Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

yhlu wrote:
> sth about SRAT in LinuxBIOS,  I have put SRAT dynamically support in 
> LinuxBIOS, but the whole acpi support still need dsdt, current we only 
> have dsdt for AMD chipset in LB. And we can not have the access the dsdt 
> asl from Nvidia chipset yet...

yeah, this is the great thing about ACPI, it has put us into a whole new 
  era of copyrighted stuff. ACPI tables describe hardware, and are 
copyright bios vendors. The question of which ACPI bits we can use in 
linuxbios is unresolved. AMD has committed to open-source ACPI tables, 
but ... what about companies like nvidia? unknown. And, to add to the 
fun, the mainboard vendors don't own their own ACPI tables -- the BIOS 
vendors do. So the mainboard vendor has their hardware design encoded 
into ACPI tables, which are copyright the bios vendor, not the mainboard 
vendor.

ACPI is a looming problem for all the open-source bios efforts out there.

I don't much like ACPI. It's just another mechanism for hiding 
information and limiting its distribution.

ron