Re: [PATCH: NEW SUBARCHITECTURE FOR 2.5.21] support for NCR voyager (3/4/5xxx series)

James Bottomley
2002-06-14T14:14:42Z

pazke@orbita1.ru said:
> IMHO Voyagers are too old and big machines to get (working) APM, and
> visws have no BIOS or limited BIOS emulation.

That depends what you mean by `apm'. In kernel/apm.c, it's tied to the
existence of the APM bios and since voyagers have no bios per say (they
actually have a SUS, which is an actively running boot OS on a tiny i386
processor which can emulate a minimal PC bios when in PC mode) then you're
correct.

Running Linux on a voyager, I can power off the machine, read the internal
power source, the status of the front panel switch and even trigger a power
management shutdown after the AC power is lost for a certain length of time
(voyagers usually have internal lead acid batteries). The way it's currently
set up, if I turn off the front panel switch, the machine will execute a clean
shutdown and power itself off when the shutdown is finished. (this is mainly
done in the voyager_thread.c file, where it keeps a kernel daemon permanently
monitoring the machine status, if you're interested).

The above are all traditional APM functions, I just don't need apm.c to do
them.

However, apm.c is still in arch/i386/kernel, just in case, so I think
mpparse.c should join it, and we should keep all the other pieces (bootflag.c
and acpi.c) in there just in case.

James