bios.h question

[Francois Tigeot]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 09:07:18AM -0700, Peter Wemm wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 September 2004 11:35 pm, Francois Tigeot wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 03:43:13PM -0700, Peter Wemm wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 14 September 2004 08:04 am, Francois Tigeot wrote:
> > > > I'm running 5.3-BETA4 and I can't find <machine/pc/bios.h> even
> > > > though bios(9) exists.
> > >
> > > We dont even have bios_sigsearch() - all the consumers in the
> > > kernel were related to vm86()/bios16()/bios32() calls, which are
> > > impossible in our kernel.
> >
> > This puzzles me, as the functions seem to be present on alpha.
> 
> No, they are not..  The prototypes are there due to over-merging and 
> lack of cleanup, but there are no implementations for the functions.

My bad, I did a quick grep in /usr/src.

> > > What do you need it for?  It might be ok to revive a subset of it,
> > > but it would be useful to know what that file is being used for
> > > first, so we know which subsets are needed.
> >
> > I am experimenting with Bruno Ducrot's powernow_k7 and need to read
> > some tables in BIOS memory area.
> 
> Ahh - bios tables.  That we can do.  This is for a kernel component, 
> right? 

Right. The table is providing CPU frequency and voltage information
corresponding to different power states.
A kernel module could use it to scale system speed according to the
average load...

At least, it seems this is what this code does on i386:
http://www.poupinou.org/cpufreq/bsd/powernow_k7/

-- 
Francois Tigeot