On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 04:16:53PM +0200, Thomas Renninger wrote:
Because, as Len has pointed out, you end up with two different ideas
about what the trip points are - the kernel's and the hardware's. That
works fine until some event in the firmware either forcibly
resynchronises the two or makes assumptions about the spec-compliance of
the interpreter.
You don't know whether the workaround will work or not until you've
performed a full audit of the platform firmware, which is going to
potentially change between BIOS versions. It's entirely legal for the
firmware to behave in this way, and even beneficial under various
circumstances.
The interface would need to be more complicated than that if you wanted
to be able to implement hysteresis, and there's the potential for
hardware damage if paramaters are set inappropriately. Even then,
there's no easy way of programatically determining whether it would work
on any given hardware.
It's fairly clearly not impossible, given that there exists at least one
OS that these machines work with.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
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