dep <dep@linuxandmain.com> [Wed, 30 Apr 2003 19:48:08 -0400]:
okay, granted. and if the purpose of the exercise is assigning blame, the job is done.
You seem to be skilled in alienating people, don't you? Why do you think that aggressively pushing your point will make the discussion any better?
if, however, the purpose of the exercise is getting suse running on customers' machines, then acpi defaulting to off, with documentation describing how to turn it on, would seem to be the right thing to do, don't you agree?
Quite frankly, no. It should stay on by default but with better blacklists and whitelists to turn it (or at least parts) off/on where needed. That's why http://www.suse.de/en/private/products/suse_linux/i386/acpi.html has this at the end: In order to be able to expand the blacklist (as well as the whitelist) for the kernel, we need to know on which systems the problems occur. Therefore, please send an e-mail message to acpi@suse.de. Tell us which kernel parameter(s) worked on your system. (Please include the output of the diagnosis tools acpidmp and dmidecode in your message. These tools are available at ftp.suse.com/pub/people/ak/diag.)
the reason acpi is broken in so many places is that intel, toshiba, and microsoft corporation have every reason to keep the standard just far enough out of reach that it is not easy for other companies to embrace.
No, that's a nice conspiration theory but IMO doesn't hold. Like other things thought up inside Intel, ACPI is extremely ambitious and so complicated (the kernel needs a complete interpreter just for ACPI) that many failed to follow the rules correctly. It needed Intel to get reasonably good ACPI support into the kernel. Philipp -- Philipp Thomas work: pthomas@suse.de Development, SuSE Linux AG private: philipp.thomas@t-link.de