MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: ACPI - what do you know about it?

ACPI is designed to solve several real problems, including that PC hardware required for minimal functionality has become increasingly complex and varied, modern CPUs are often capable of operating in multiple incompatible modes and there are a number of radically different operating systems in common use. Something needed to be done about it. ACPI is over-engineered and ugly - there are other, more elegant solutions to the same problems, such as Open Firmware. But ACPI isn't fundamentally flawed - it could do what it says on the can.

The problems are, of course, in implementation. The initial implementation of ACPI support in Windows was completely broken, but it was the first major operating system to support ACPI in any way. Hardware manufacturers started adding ACPI features, but rather than targeting the standard, they targeted Microsoft's broken implementation. As a result, a lot of hardware won't work with a compliant ACPI implementation, and OS developers are stuck trying to emulate Microsoft's broken implementation in order to provide compatibility with these devices. (Kind of like browser vendors emulating the quirks of other browsers so that poorly written HTML/CSS would display how the user expected.)

As for Linus, he's great at whining about problems without offering workable solutions.