Re: [PATCH 2/9] x86: introduce a set of platform feature flags

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@linux.intel.com>]

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> Btw., this enumeration of basic PC features isnt bad in itself - and 
> if there's a boot-flag based detection method (like on MRST) then 
> this can convey a 'should this platform driver attempt to 
> initialize' information to the driver, and rather cleanly so.
> 

That is the whole point of this, yes.  Furthermore, it is expected that
we *also* would be able to set platform flags based on early probes.

> But there's bad uses of this as well, and those bad uses seem to 
> dominate this patch-set.

Not entirely surprising, since this stuff is more or less randomly
sprinkled through the existing code.  We have a huge bunch of legacy
code and yes, it needs cleanup.

This is a huge opportunity, of course, but it's going to be a lot of
work.  A lot of this is likely to overlap directly with the needs of
Xen, too.

	-hpa