Removing acpi.ko support

Scott Long scottl at samsco.org
Thu Oct 28 17:31:10 UTC 2010


On Oct 28, 2010, at 10:54 AM, John Baldwin wrote:
> [ cc'ing acpi@ to be safe, but I think the topic warrants the wider audience 
> of arch@ ]
> 
> I think we should drop support for having acpi load as a module for i386.  It 
> adds extra complication and hacks to the i386 APIC and interrupt code that are 
> gratuitously different from amd64 as a result.  Originally it was made a 
> module so that GENERIC on i386 did not include ACPI by default but would only 
> use up memory to hold ACPI-related code if the machine supported ACPI.  Now 
> that acpi is part of GENERIC on i386 in 8.0 and later this argument is no 
> longer relevant.  I'd like to remove support for ACPI as a module to remove 
> the various hacks on i386 and reduce differences with amd64.
> 

Just to be clear, it'll still be an optional kernel device, it just won't be a KLD anymore, right?  If you do that, what will happen with the evil bootloader code that gropes around for the AML tables and auto-loads the module?  Is there any reason to keep that around for compatibility?  If it goes away, don't forget to also update the bootforth code that knows how to manipulate it.

Scott




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