2010/4/5 ron minnich <rminn...@gmail.com>: > On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 2:20 AM, Richard Miller <9f...@hamnavoe.com> wrote: >>> i've had a core i7 machine for some time with 4c/8t. >>> unfortunately, the mp table has only 4 processor entries. >> >> My impression is that mp tables are getting worse and worse on new >> hardware because vendors assume everyone is running an acpi-aware OS. >> > > that's precisely the problem. We've seen cases where vendors too > bioses from an old machine to a new machine. If you are not acpi aware > you are pretty much 5 years out of date.
It's not just that. The other part is that you can put OS-specific information into the AML, which is nice in theory, until you consider that most vendors consider Windows to be the only operating system in existence. (This is why FreeBSD allows you to override the tables -- you can rewrite those sections to apply to FreeBSD, and most of the time, that works just fine). That said, things have settled down a good bit in ACPI land and Intel's ACPICA reference implementation is fairly complete (but unfortunately not something we can use). Nemo, I wonder if you have any way to allow others to collaborate on that code? Seems like there's certainly interest, and the ACPI spec *is* open... --dho
