On Thursday 07 February 2008 22:34:55 Pavel Machek wrote:
In plain English? ACPI-WMI is a nasty hack/ abuse of ACPI by Microsoft to
force their driver model into ACPI, and that should be thoroughly discouraged
from further use.
However, since quite a few laptop vendors rely on it for basic functionality,
we have to implement it (or a part of it) as well.
Yes, WMI itself is supposed to be an instrumentation/ management thing, as
well as, if I understand, part of their driver model, and ACPI-WMI is a part
of that - by and of itself though, ACPI-WMI is _not_ the whole of WMI.
All that the Linux driver currently cares about is translating this crap into
something that we can actually use in Linux to make hardware work (kernel
space). So at the moment, ACPI-WMI is exactly what it says it is - not a lot.
It needs another driver on top to do something useful (e.g. acer-wmi,
tc1100-wmi).
Later on, we will try and replicate the rest of the 'specification', which is
supposed to export all this rubbish (data, and direct access to various ACPI
methods defined in a WMI device) to userspace.
If you can make heads or tails of WBEM, please feel free to let me know.
AFAICT, it's supposed to be a means of providing some sort of web based
management/ instrumentation.
So yes, I agree with you the documentation is crap - but it needs to be redone
anyway, and I've already had that pointed out to me.
As for the Kconfig - I'm open to suggestions.
-Carlos
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