Updating ACPI (Re: Shutdown)

[YONETANI Tomokazu]

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 01:10:50PM +0200, Sascha Wildner wrote:
> Yonetani, just curious (therefore off-list). Are there any plans on your 
> side to upgrade ACPI to a new version? Is that advisable?

(moving to kernel@ as NJABL wouldn't let my message through to you...)
I don't have a concrete plan for changing it yet, mainly because
I haven't had enough time for porting the stuff until very recently.
If someone already has plans, please go ahead; otherwise, I'm going to
start working on it within this month.

As for "upgrading," I think there are at least three major things to do
(which affect each other):
- porting many fixes that have hit FreeBSD since July of 2004 but haven't
  been ported to DragonFly yet; this may involve changes to other places
  than just /sys/{dev,${ARCH}}/acpica5, and some of them may not easily be
  applicable to DragonFly
- porting cpufreq framework and the related "support" drivers and userland
  programs(which also may involve additional supports from kernel, like
  dev.* sysctl tree or notification to userland daemons, if we're to take
  the FreeBSD-way of doing these things);
- updating Intel ACPI-CA code(which resides in /sys/contrib/dev);
  this needs to be done anyway in the course of porting changes from
  FreeBSD, which relies on the newer version of ACPI-CA code than it is
  in DragonFly.

Updating the Intel ACPI-CA code only probably won't make people very happy,
at least it wouldn't the last time I did.  The fact that some hardware works
fine with ACPI on FreeBSD(or Linux) but not very well with DragonFly may
have some other reasons(like bugs or imcompatibilities in our ACPI-
supporting code), not just because of older version of ACPI-CA code.

Regards.