a thought on laptops

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 11:53:20AM +0100, Oliver Grawert wrote:

> recognizing that there are a lot of laptops that need
> acpi/lapic/apic/irq adjustment in grub, i'd like to suggest a little
> project:
>
> i know on my laptops there is dmidecode to retrieve model and brand
> name, if it were included in the installer, there could be a two column
> flatfile with the brand/model in one column and the grub options in the
> second column. now run dmidecode on installation, detect the model/brand
> and adjust the grub boot line based on a simple pattern match through
> this file. if the model isnt found it just goes with the defaults.
> i think this is an easy task with the provided tools. its in fact just a
> gluing together of already existing stuff but will make a lot of laptop
> users happier.

Any acpi/lapic/apic options which are required generally represent bugs,
either in the BIOS or the kernel.  Either way, they ought to be fixed in the
kernel so that everything works out of the box.  This data collection could
help us do that, but only if it "talks back".

In many cases, these options are required even to boot or to detect the
CD-ROM properly, so it is important that these bugs be fixed or worked
around in the kernel, rather than with command-line options.

As others have pointed out, this kind of data collection fits nicely into
the hardware database project.

-- 
 - mdz