Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:16:23 -0800 | From | Greg KH <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 0/5][RFC] Physical PCI slot objects |
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On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 03:01:01PM -0700, Bjorn Helgaas wrote: > On Tuesday 13 November 2007 02:30:49 pm Greg KH wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 01:36:45PM -0700, Alex Chiang wrote: > > > * Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>: > > > > IBM sells a program that does this for server rooms. It's > > > > probably part of some Tivoli package somewhere, sorry I don't > > > > remember the name. I did see it working many years ago and it > > > > required no kernel changes at all to work properly. > > Do you know how this Tivoli package works or where it gets the > information?
I was told it was just reading the ACPI tables from userspace. As I saw it running on a machine without a modified kernel, I had no reason to doubt this, but it might be doing something else for all I know.
What I do know is that it somehow does work without any kernel changes needed, and is in use today by very large data centers without any problems.
> > > Like I said in an earlier email, HP ia64 systems will require a > > > kernel change to get this information. Whether it comes via a > > > generic ACPI access layer like dev_acpi, or something like this > > > patch series, the kernel will still get touched. > > > > And like I said, I'm pretty sure you don't need to touch the kernel > > today as there are people doing this just fine from userspace without > > any kernel changes needed :) > > I think you are assuming userspace can just dump the raw ACPI tables > and extract this information from them. But I don't think that's > possible because _SUN is a method that can contain arbitrary AML. > That AML has to be *executed*, and you can't do that safely in > userspace.
Yes, I was assuming that based on the above running code, if this is somehow impossible to do from userspace, I don't know what the code is doing.
thanks,
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