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Date:      Wed, 9 Dec 2009 15:29:41 -0500
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
To:        "Moore, Robert" <robert.moore@intel.com>
Cc:        "freebsd-acpi@freebsd.org" <freebsd-acpi@freebsd.org>, Andrew Pantyukhin <infofarmer@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: libi386/biosacpi.c - bad RSDP checksum search
Message-ID:  <200912091529.41293.jhb@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <4911F71203A09E4D9981D27F9D83085840DA9AC8@orsmsx503.amr.corp.intel.com>
References:  <20091208060339.GK98273@pollux.cenkes.org> <200912080749.55710.jhb@freebsd.org> <4911F71203A09E4D9981D27F9D83085840DA9AC8@orsmsx503.amr.corp.intel.com>

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On Wednesday 09 December 2009 1:46:36 pm Moore, Robert wrote:
> Might be a dumb question, but why is the bootloader looking around for ACPI
> tables in the first place?

I think it only does so for two different reasons.  First, it sets some
kernel environment variables with the locations of the RSDP as well as the
RSDT or XDST.  The FreeBSD version of acpidump will then use these variables
if they are set instead of walking memory to find the tables.  The bigger
reason is that on FreeBSD/i386 ACPI can be compiled as an optional kernel
module (and until 8.0 it was provided as a module rather than statically
compiled into the main kernel image by default), and that the loader will
automatically load the ACPI module when loading a kernel if it detects that
ACPI is present.  This latter functionality is largely obsolete in FreeBSD
8.0 and later though since ACPI is now compiled into the kernel by default.

-- 
John Baldwin



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