Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Originally posted by: bersl2
First of all, it would be nice to check out how other people faired with the same make of your laptop. Sometimes there tends to be problems with the ACPI implementations (basically, power management). It's due to the fact that some OEMs use the absolutely (purposely?) sucktacular Microsoft ASL compiler; but you don't need to know the details, only that it's Microsoft's fault
. A search should turn up something. Distro doesn't matter for this, only whether you do or do not have to patch the ACPI tables.
From what I've read, ACPI is a horrible standard and OEMs like shipping with broken implimentations.
Well, no one really takes advantage of all the capabilities of the standard; whether it's because it sucks, I wouldn't know. But I wasn't even talking about broken w.r.t. the whole standard: I was talking about w.r.t. the syntactic rules of ASL and AML.
The Differentiated System Description Table, which does a good deal of behind-the-scenes work between OS and hardware**, is written in a standardized source language and compiled into a standardized bytecode. The MS compiler* will accept source with incorrect syntax and spit out invalid bytecode, and when the standard-compliant ACPI stack in Linux reads an unrecoverably bad DSDT from ROM and attempts to interpret it, it can result in a frozen boot, requiring you to disable ACPI or fix the DSDT using Intel's compliant compiler, then patch the kernel to read the modified DSDT from a ramdisk or hardcode it. Luckily, there's a big database of patched DSDTs for many machines, so you don't have to do that part yourself.
* I said "purposely?" because I personally can't decide whether the production of a buggy compiler that coincides with a similarly buggy ACPI implementation in Windows is done out of malice or stupidity.
** Just so you know the supposed reasons behind ACPI, from the standard's documentation's introduction:
The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification was developed to establish industry
common interfaces enabling robust operating system (OS)-directed motherboard device configuration and
power management of both devices and entire systems. ACPI is the key element in Operating System-
directed configuration and Power Management (OSPM).
ACPI evolves the existing collection of power management BIOS code, Advanced Power Management
(APM) application programming interfaces (APIs, PNPBIOS APIs, Multiprocessor Specification (MPS)
tables and so on into a well-defined power management and configuration interface specification. ACPI
provides the means for an orderly transition from existing (legacy) hardware to ACPI hardware, and it
allows for both ACPI and legacy mechanisms to exist in a single machine and to be used as needed.
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