Mark Shuttleworth Calls For An End To ACPI

[89c51]

Unless someone makes a linux pc (ie something like apple for linux to get what i mean) none of the big MFGs will give a fuck about what Mark, Alan or any other linux user thinks about ACPI.

[jeffgus]

Unless someone makes a linux pc (ie something like apple for linux to get what i mean) none of the big MFGs will give a fuck about what Mark, Alan or any other linux user thinks about ACPI.

Chromebook?

[Luke_Wolf]

Unless someone makes a linux pc (ie something like apple for linux to get what i mean) none of the big MFGs will give a fuck about what Mark, Alan or any other linux user thinks about ACPI.

This ^ is exactly the problem

[hooluupog]

Chromebook?

chromebooks are using coreboot,how does it compare with acpi,uefi?

[stiiixy]

Ironically, Mark made his millions in security.

So yeah, doubly so, why the long-arse wait to call out what most of us already knew?

Maybe has some investment somewhere that he wants to push and will be ACPI-free.

[sireangelus]

chromebooks are using coreboot,how does it compare with acpi,uefi?

coreboot is just an open source bios.This bios is both acpi and uefi.

[GreatEmerald]

coreboot is just an open source bios.This bios is both acpi and uefi.

BIOS is a type of firmware. Coreboot is not BIOS, and UEFI is not BIOS either. They are both different kinds of firmware. Coreboot can optionally provide ACPI, yes, and that's needed to run current hardware with power management. Coreboot can also chainload BIOS or UEFI for OSs that need those things (mostly Windows), but again that's optional.

[toka]

How stuff works..

Oh, if only we had good articles which explain how stuff works (to non-idiots).

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_startup_process
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreboot
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_U-Boot
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootloader

And oh, look, isn't that a funny screenshot:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bootloader_Android_HTC_Pico.JPG

Sue, if only we also had some schemes, that visualize processes...

[chithanh]

UEFI is a useless but glamous GUI interface to the system BIOS for the "point & click" crowd.

Unless someone makes a linux pc (ie something like apple for linux to get what i mean) none of the big MFGs will give a fuck about what Mark, Alan or any other linux user thinks about ACPI.

There are actually PCs who are Linux-only and which do sell in the millions. One is the Chromebook which was already mentioned and uses Coreboot. Coreboot can directly load a Linux kernel as payload, no need for BIOS or UEFI. However, some kind of VGA BIOS may be needed under certain circumstances still.

The other is the OLPC XO series (x86 and ARM), which uses Open Firmware, and does power management without ACPI. The implementation in the OLPC is quite compact, and the IEEE 1275 Open Firmware specification is around 266 pages. Compare this to 1084 pages for Intel EFI 1.10, which has grown to 1437 pages for UEFI 2.0 (I don't know the current count for UEFI 2.4, but I believe it is above 2000 pages now).

So it should be clear to anybody who values small and easy to verify boot code that UEFI is totally contrary to this goal.

[tuubi]

So it should be clear to anybody who values small and easy to verify boot code that UEFI is totally contrary to this goal.

UEFI is quite complex, that's a given, but amount of documentation is hardly the best measure for software complexity in the general case. Then again, without reading either spec, I wonder if Open Firmware wouldn't need to be just a bit more complex to cover the whole scope of UEFI. Not that all the functionality UEFI provides is necessary or even desirable from a user's standpoint.