OpenBSD Journal

Help bring ACPI support to OpenBSD

Contributed by jolan on from the OMGWTFACPI dept.

jordan@ is working on ACPI support and has written an ASL parser and an AML interpreter. In order to test it he needs dumps from as many systems as possible. The tool to do the dumps works completely from userland so there's no intrusive kernel patching required. If you've been whining about the lack of ACPI support then here's your chance to step up and take action. Further details can be found in marco@'s mail to misc@.

By the way, this will work on amd64 as well. Just change -li386 to -lamd64 in the Makefile before building.

Note: No more reports needed!

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (128.141.43.141) on

    What exactly will having ACPI support/functionality do and what is ACPI anyway ? ACPI = Advanced Configuration Power Interface ..

    Comments
    1. By Erik Wikström (81.231.157.81) on

      Most people think ACPI=power-management (an in a better version of APM) but it is also useful for detecting and configuring hardware.

      A quick overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acpi

    2. By Dan (70.64.189.188) on

      Yes.. Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. It's like plug and play that actually works and power management all rolled into one. Very useful. Cardbus cards tend to need it to work properly.

      Comments
      1. By Brad (204.101.180.70) brad at comstyle dot com on

        CardBus does NOT require ACPI. We've been using CardBus cards for many years now, and before ACPI even existed.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (83.147.128.114) on

          althought its true that some laptops (my sony at least) need acpi to set up the cardbus slot properly.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (193.63.217.208) on

    Does acpidump need to be built/run on a specific version of OpenBSD? 3.7 or later perhaps?

    Comments
    1. By m0rf (68.104.17.51) on

      by acpidump you mean acpiscan, and i believe it just accesses /dev/mem so i don't believe a specific version is required.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (193.63.217.208) on

        Ack, yes, I meant acpiscan. Need more sleep or coffee before I post :( Thanks for the answer :)

      2. By Anonymous Coward (128.151.92.148) on

        I don't know if you've noticed this, but OpenBSD doesn't let just anyone touch /dev/mem. Even if you're root.

  3. By Anonymous Coward (81.57.42.108) on

    acpi.c contains all the portability hooks to make it compile and run on Linux platform (through ifdef's).

    It compiles fine on linux with: gcc -DLINUX -O2 acpiscan.c -o acpiscan

    All my laptops runs linux, so ... Are you interessted on results obtained by running this on Linux too ? Should I send them ?

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (83.49.208.58) on

      No way! Lunix is for lamers!

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (203.26.16.66) on

        I dont see how anyone can even take this comment seriously

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (69.3.210.170) on

          I take that comment very seriously! Seriously, geez, all these OSes have their place and their good and bad features. I have both Linux and OpenBSD machines (but nothing else). If OpenBSD would get better support for Java applications (comparable to Sun's JDK) I would switch to OpenBSD 100% I think.

    2. By m0rf (68.104.17.51) on

      i imagine they are worth sending as long as getting them from a linux machine is mentioned.

      please ignore the anonymous troll/hysterically funny moron at 83.49.208.58, who was quite convincing except he forget to say "freebsd rox0rs!"

  4. By Anonymous Coward (81.57.42.108) on

    A developer advised to join dmesg on the tarball, too: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=113151768814631&w=2

    ps: fresh dmesgs, without runtime oddities can be found on your system in /var/run/dmesg.boot

    my question above about linux results is to extend about freebsd. acpiscan compile well on freebsd, assumed you apply the trivial:

    --- acpiscan.c.orig     Wed Nov  9 15:09:49 2005
    +++ acpiscan.c  Wed Nov  9 15:10:22 2005
    @@ -66,7 +66,7 @@
     /*======================================================
      * OpenBSD specific
      *======================================================*/
    -#ifdef __OpenBSD__
    +#if defined(__OpenBSD__) || defined(__FreeBSD__)
     #define _XOPEN_SOURCE 500
    

  5. By Anonymous Coward (70.52.15.143) on

    Is ACPI only on newer systems, or even on laptops such as a Pentium 133, 166 and 233?

    I have quite a few other newer systems I can run this on too. Now question is, is there a way to make a bootable cd with this util already compiled and ready to run (in other words, boot up a system that already has another OS, using this CD, copy the output to disk or such) then reboot back to original OS without having to install OpenBSD on it?

    If so, I think a lot more people could easily test a larger variety of systems and help more by submitting this data back.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (69.70.207.240) on

      If who knows how that can create this (and maybe distribute via bittorrent?) then I can do this on some servers at my company.

      Comments
      1. By gp (84.15.24.34) on

        I guess you can do that by creating custom boot-only iso with bsd.rd plus staticaly compiled acpiscan. After booting kernel you just type 's' to enter interactive shell and run acpiscan.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (68.161.14.158) on

          Look at the OpenIDS system too. Although it is just a heavily modified bsd.rd from the installer, it could be used to simply test ACPI with this app built static on there.

  6. Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (82.43.92.127) on

      Good news that they have what they need :) I look forward to improved ACPI in OpenBSD :)

      Comments
      1. By Brad (216.138.195.228) brad at comstyle dot com on

        You mean ACPI support period. OpenBSD has no ACPI support at all at the moment.

        Comments
        1. By Chris (24.76.100.162) on

          Well, that would be an improvement ;)

  7. By Charles Hill (216.229.170.65) on

    Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing if the same people who posted "ACPI sucks" or "ACPI is poorly designed" two articles ago start raving how good it is when this code is finished.

    * * *

    On another note, I know Linux's ACPI implementation is NOT SMP safe -- it tells me so every time I boot my dual-P3 into Linux. I wonder if that is going to be a hiccup for Marco & group or they'll be able to do it right.

    I know they received a plethora of dumps, but I wonder how many were SMP...

    -Charles

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (87.78.69.167) on

      I'm sure they have some ACPI capable SMP systems in reach they could get the scan from on their own.

    2. By m0rf (68.104.17.51) on

      well if you sent a dump from one of your SMP systems, at least one.

    3. By tedu (64.173.147.27) on

      "ACPI is poorly designed"

      that's an invariant, so nobody's gonna retract their statement. :)

    4. By Anonymous Coward (203.26.16.66) on

      "Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing if the same people who posted "ACPI sucks" or "ACPI is poorly designed" two articles ago start raving how good it is when this code is finished" lol

      Comments
      1. By djm@ (203.217.30.86) on

        I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive. apm sucks and is badly designed (though simple), but I love using it to hibernate my laptop.

    5. By m0rf (68.104.17.51) on

      personally i'm looking forward to those people who claimed that lack of acpi support for openbsd was the reason they couldn't use it/recommend it, to actually start using it and stop whining on undeadly.

      but i'm not holding my breath.

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