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PCs are quite hard to boot too with UEFI Let's hope RISC-V can avoid something stunningly complex like ACPI while they are at it. You might be trying to write
by jws 9y ago
PCs are quite hard to boot too with UEFI
Let's hope RISC-V can avoid something stunningly complex like ACPI while they are at it. You might be trying to write a secure OS of well reviewed code, then suddenly find that to reliably shut down a PC you need ACPI which drags in 100000 lines of code including an interpreter capable of accessing arbitrary physical addresses. (Or you just try all the shutdown mechanisms you've ever heard of and hope one of them nails the machine you are running on.)
I wonder if hardware is easy enough now that a platform could require that all optional hardware respond with a UUID during an enumeration phase. That would have been a burden back in early ISA days when things were as simple as a couple registers on a card, but maybe now it isn't. Then the OS can handle the ones it knows about and leave the rest alone.
- tmzt 9y agoWhat about dtb and standardizing something like coreboot's libfirmware. Should it really be up to every hardware block to support full introspection? Doesn't that start to turn into PnPIsA? The eeprom solution starts to sound a lot like how Dimms are identified and configured.
- hinkley 9y agoLearning to write a better ACPI script for my lifebook was a big accomplishment for me, but ultimately lead me to a 13” MacBook Pro. I suspect it’s such a hidden part of the whole process of using a computer that few repercussions are felt. Since not enough negative PR value, it changes but slowly. Though it sure does suck for portability.
- tmzt 9y agoIt would be pretty cool to have a DSDT to kernel c compiler allowing us to port our laptops over to native power management over time. We should be able to write gpio chip drivers for the actual hardware which the interpreter normally targets and eventually eliminate ACPI from our systems.
- sliverstorm 9y agoI suspect it’s such a hidden part of the whole process of using a computer that few repercussions are felt. Not only hidden, but mostly does its job these days, and has been ignored by everyone so they can get on to writing "Uber but with ML". There's a shocking amount of stuff like that, made decades ago and still there just because... well, it's still working.
- hinkley 9y agoThe plot of one of Vernor Vinge’s books involves a man who has been in cryo sleep for a couple hundred years. When he wakes up their (essentially) IoT devices are still running his code under layers and layers of abstraction. He promptly hijacks all of them and ultimately uses them to avert a conspiracy (and susbtitite an ethically more defensible one of his own).