Re: Some questions regarding ACPI

[YONETANI Tomokazu <qhwt+dfly@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 01:22:46PM +0200, Hasso Tepper wrote:
> I'm working on bringing in some laptop (and especially thinkpad) specific 
> ACPI code from FreeBSD into DragonFly. I never touched ACPI stuff before 
> and haven't followed it much either, so I have some questions.

So you want to port some of ACPI support drivers, or to do a fresh port
of ACPI driver from FreeBSD?

> * FreeBSD uses ACPI_SERIAL_* heavily. What's the locking situation in 
>   DragonFly and why?

The current ACPI driver in DragonFly is based on that of FreeBSD as of
end of June, 2004, plus some fixes brought in later (and ACPICA part
has been updated twice since then).  That was before they introduced
the MPSAFE changes into ACPI code, and we use critical section
(crit_{enter,exit}) in most places (and lockmgr lock in a few place).

> * As far as I can see, PCI integration is commented out in DragonFly. 
>   What's the state of it and why?

When we replaced the implementation taken from FreeBSD 4.x with that
brought from FreeBSD 5.x, which added the PCI part, many people
experienced problems until they turned off ACPI completely, or add "pci"
to "debug.acpi.disabled" loader variable.  AFAIK the PCI part in the ACPI
driver almost hasn't been adjusted to work with our version of PCI code.

> * platform/pc32/acpica5/acpi_toshiba.c - why is it there? I don't think 
>   that this is something pc32 specific in it and it should work in pc64 
>   laptops as well. Any objections to move it into 
>   dev/acpica5/acpi_toshiba/ ?

In FreeBSD it used to be sitting at i386/acpica/acpi_toshiba.c and was
later moved into acpi_support.  That change hasn't hit our tree (in fact,
we have no acpi support drivers other than that).  It seems that FreeBSD
has them in dev/acpi_support now, and we for some reason have that
directory in our CVS repository (but containing no files in it).

> What's the current status of ACPI in general? AFAICS our acpica is quite 
> old - what needs to be done to bring in newer one?

Actually, it's not very important to keep just ACPICA latest, but
if you bring the ACPI driver from FreeBSD you need to bring ACPICA code
that matches their version, and it IS important.  And it generally requires
you much work to just update ACPICA part anyway because of how they
change things on every release.

Cheers.