DSDT loading patch

DISCUSSION David Goodenough 2 participants 4 messages Dec 6, 2004 3 messages not in the archive ACPI

Share & tools

David Goodenough

author

2004-12-06 09:07 UTC #0 lore raw

I recently bought my eldest son a Samsung P28 laptop, which works just fine with Linux except of course that it suffers from a badly built DSDT. I have found instructions as to how to fix it and found that this required me to add in a patch to the kernel to allow a DSDT image to be appended to the initrd image. This patch seems to have been around for a long time and judging by the number of machines listed as needing to have their DSDT updated there is a need to have this patch in the standard kernel. Is there a reason why this patch has not been included?

The most useful page I found that describes this particular patch was
http://gaugusch.at/kernel.shtml, which says that SuSE now include the patch anyway, and that Mandrake are considering it.

David

-------------------------------------------------------
SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide
Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now.
http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/

A message that is not in the archive (sent off-list or not yet received): 200412060907.53079.david.goodenough-6b45v/[email protected]

Andrew Barr

2004-12-06 12:40 UTC #2 lore raw

Quoted 9 lines · David Goodenough

I recently bought my eldest son a Samsung P28 laptop, which works just fine with Linux except of course that it suffers from a badly built DSDT. I have found instructions as to how to fix it and found that this required me to add in a patch to the kernel to allow a DSDT image to be appended to the initrd image. This patch seems to have been around for a long time and judging by the number of machines listed as needing to have their DSDT updated there is a need to have this patch in the standard kernel. Is there a reason why this patch has not been included?

Quoted 5 lines

The most useful page I found that describes this particular patch was
http://gaugusch.at/kernel.shtml, which says that SuSE now include the patch anyway, and that Mandrake are considering it.
David

There is a feature to compile-in the DSDT included in ACPI patch 20041105. I forget if it's in kernel 2.6.9 or not. I think the DSDT-in-initrd technique is not recommended anymore.

Andrew

A message that is not in the archive (sent off-list or not yet received): 200412060740.25524.barr.156-ZbGKxL/[email protected]

David Goodenough

author

2004-12-06 14:35 UTC #4 lore raw

Quoted 14 lines · Andrew Barr

Quoted 13 lines · David Goodenough
I recently bought my eldest son a Samsung P28 laptop, which works just fine with Linux except of course that it suffers from a badly built DSDT.
I have found instructions as to how to fix it and found that this
required me to add in a patch to the kernel to allow a DSDT image to be appended to the initrd image. This patch seems to have been around for a long time and judging by the number of machines listed as needing to have their DSDT updated there is a need to have this patch in the standard kernel. Is there a reason why this patch has not been included?
The most useful page I found that describes this particular patch was
http://gaugusch.at/kernel.shtml, which says that SuSE now include the patch anyway, and that Mandrake are considering it.

Quoted 7 lines

Quoted 1 line
David
There is a feature to compile-in the DSDT included in ACPI patch 20041105. I forget if it's in kernel 2.6.9 or not. I think the DSDT-in-initrd technique is not recommended anymore.
Andrew

Thanks for the reply. I am glad that some feature to get this in is now getting in to the standard kernel, but it does strike me that this in-initrd method means that normally you would not have to rebuild your kernel just because you have a buggy DSDT every time you put up a new kernel. Normally these days I can work with the stock Debian kernels, and so I do not need to rebuild the kernel every time.

Do you know who decided this and why?

Regards

David

A message that is not in the archive (sent off-list or not yet received): 200412061435.23333.david.goodenough-6b45v/[email protected]

Andrew Barr

2004-12-06 15:14 UTC #6 lore raw

On Monday 06 December 2004 9:35 am, David Goodenough wrote:
[...]

Quoted 7 lines

Thanks for the reply. I am glad that some feature to get this in is now getting in to the standard kernel, but it does strike me that this in-initrd method means that normally you would not have to rebuild your kernel just because you have a buggy DSDT every time you put up a new kernel. Normally these days I can work with the stock Debian kernels, and so I do not need to rebuild the kernel every time.

Quoted 5 lines

Do you know who decided this and why?
Regards
David

You'll only need to rebuild your kernel if your DSDT changes and is still
buggy: for example, if Samsung updates their BIOS and you upgrade, and they've changed the DSDT but not fixed the bugs that the ACPI subsystem had problems with.

The initrd method is only adventageous if you are in the process of fixing your DSDT and you'd like to test different DSDTs and don't want to recompile your kernel each time. The in-kernel method is actually better for me; that way I don't have to remeber to append the DSDT to the generated initrd.

The initrd method is no longer used for technical reasons I don't remember exactly.

Andrew