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Hi Pavel, On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:38:04 +0000, Pavel Machek wrote:I never suggested otherwise. But the Linux 2.6 device driver model is based, in part, on the fact that each driver must request the resources it needs before actually using them. The acpi subsystem fails to do that, so it is, in that sense, misbehaving. The is the root cause of the problems people are reporting these days. It really doesn't have anything to do with bit-banged I2C. It's about SMBus master chips (most often embedded in south bridges), hardware monitoring chips (be them SMBus-based or not), or basically any driver which uses a resource ACPI is using as well (virtually any driver accessing a Super-IO/LPC device is affected, for example.) Secondly, your logic is somewhat broken. Just because one specification doesn't explicitely allow me to do something, I must stop doing it? There must be two dozen different specifications modern PC hardware supposedly conforms to. If we stop doing everything which isn't explicitely allowed by all of them, I fear there won't be much left ;) A better question would be IMHO: Does the ACPI specification explicitely _prohibits_ accessing directly to some categories of hardware? Lastly, I wholeheartedly agree that the core problem appears to be in the ACPI design rather than in the Linux implementation. As a matter of fact, other operating systems are facing the same problem [1]. The problem isn't less real, though. I would like them to be driver-model-friendly, that's even a broader challenge ;) I would love things to be that easy, but unfortunately they are not. Firstly, the first records of hidden SMBus, in September 2000, predate ACPI. All the early boards where the SMBus was hidden did not have ACPI code poking at it at all, so this is definitely not the reason why it was removed. The Asus P4 series is a good example of that. Unhiding the SMBus on these boards actually let the user take benefit of the hardware they had paid for. Secondly, only a few south bridges are capable of hiding the SMBus. And an even smaller number of systems have their SMBus actually hidden by the BIOS. A much large number of systems, especially recent ones, have ACPI poking at the hardware monitoring chip (again, SMBus-based or not.) So there is no correlation between hidden SMBus and ACPI poking at the hardware monitoring chip. So, even though we are very careful these days when adding a quirk to unhide the SMBus on a new system (we make sure that ACPI isn't accessing it), this is not going to solve the general problem. I would be happy to prevent SMBus and/or hardware monitoring drivers from being loaded on ACPI-based system if we had a way to know which systems do have ACPI code accessing these chips and which do not, and if ACPI was offering a level of functionality comparable to what individual hardware monitoring drivers offer. Unfortunately: 1* As far as I know, we currently have no way to know if the ACPI code plans to ever access the hardware monitoring chip. If the acpi subsystem could export this information somehow, it would help a lot. But I'm not familiar with ACPI, so I don't know if this is feasable or not. We just can't prevent the SMBus and hardware monitoring drivers drivers from being loaded as soon as ACPI is enabled. This would prevent a majority of users from using them, while they work fine for most of them. 2* The hardware monitoring features offered by ACPI today are one level of magnitude weaker than what lm_sensors was already offering back in 1999. The monitoring chips can do much but unfortunately ACPI only exposes a very small subset of the chip features. ACPI doesn't handle voltage monitoring at all. It usually reports no more than one fan, and in my experience, more often than not, the speed is reported as a boolean (spinning or not), when lm_sensors gives you the exact speed of all your fans. ACPI thermal zones are not so bad, but the interface to control them is ugly, and lm_sensors usually gives more details. And more importantly, on almost all desktop and server motherboards, ACPI does _not_ provide any hardware monitoring feature. So we really can't go tell our users: give up the individual hardware monitoring drivers and lm_sensors on all ACPI-enabled systems and use whatever ACPI offers instead. This would be a major functionality loss for a vast majority of users. What do you propose? [1] http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pnppwr/powermgmt/BIOSAML.mspx -- Jean Delvare -
