3 ms·

I doubt very much that the commodity hardware in Apple laptops exposes any ACPI methods of which other operating systems are unaware. They are the same compone

I doubt very much that the commodity hardware in Apple laptops exposes any ACPI methods of which other operating systems are unaware. They are the same components as widely used, just packaged differently ( as lspci from Linux on an Apple machine will show ). From memory the only Apple-branded components were the SD card readers and the keyboard. And how would Intel / Nvidia / Broadcom / Samsung / LG / whomever be persuaded to keep it a secret?

revelation 13y ago
Apple does use an extra microcontroller or small processor in MacBooks and other machines that controls fans and probably a large number of other power related things. They call it the SMC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Controller So maybe not ACPI, but homebrew.
- temac 13y ago
  Everybody does that. This has not much to do with ACPI. ACPI is mainly a software thing (yes, you have some dedicated register support in some chips, but the baseline of those that are absolutely necessary is quite small and well supported by chip vendors) ACPI has also proven to be an idea with a very bad execution: much of the tables are filled with bugs, and the spec has been written by complete psychopaths. IIRC sometimes it is better to skip entire sections and to use a custom written driver for each OS (like Intel did for some processors or chipsets for Linux I think) Remember that ACPI has been created in part by MS, and that Bill himself wanted a conception that was easy for windows and hard for the other. I'm not sure this has been executed for the conception (even though the result is a mess), but MS absolutely managed to create an ecosystem where board vendors test only on Windows and ship if this kind of work, regardless of the amount of obvious bug present in their ACPI code.
mjg59 13y ago
You might doubt it, but it's entirely true. Apple aggressively cut power to unused devices and provide out of band mechanisms to generate wakeup notifications. Apple will entirely cut power to an SDHCI or Thunderbolt controller that's not in use. Windows won't. There's nothing secret about this. Anyone who spends a while looking at the ACPI tables will see it. Recent versions of ACPI provide a standardised mechanism for doing this, but Apple have chosen to continue using their custom implementation.

revelation 13y ago

Apple does use an extra microcontroller or small processor in MacBooks and other machines that controls fans and probably a large number of other power related things. They call it the SMC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Controller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Controller So maybe not ACPI, but homebrew.

temac 13y ago
Everybody does that. This has not much to do with ACPI. ACPI is mainly a software thing (yes, you have some dedicated register support in some chips, but the baseline of those that are absolutely necessary is quite small and well supported by chip vendors) ACPI has also proven to be an idea with a very bad execution: much of the tables are filled with bugs, and the spec has been written by complete psychopaths. IIRC sometimes it is better to skip entire sections and to use a custom written driver for each OS (like Intel did for some processors or chipsets for Linux I think) Remember that ACPI has been created in part by MS, and that Bill himself wanted a conception that was easy for windows and hard for the other. I'm not sure this has been executed for the conception (even though the result is a mess), but MS absolutely managed to create an ecosystem where board vendors test only on Windows and ship if this kind of work, regardless of the amount of obvious bug present in their ACPI code.

mjg59 13y ago

You might doubt it, but it's entirely true. Apple aggressively cut power to unused devices and provide out of band mechanisms to generate wakeup notifications. Apple will entirely cut power to an SDHCI or Thunderbolt controller that's not in use. Windows won't. There's nothing secret about this. Anyone who spends a while looking at the ACPI tables will see it. Recent versions of ACPI provide a standardised mechanism for doing this, but Apple have chosen to continue using their custom implementation.