Re: [PATCH: NEW SUBARCHITECTURE FOR 2.5.21] support for NCR voyager (3/4/5xxx series)

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@steeleye.com>]

pazke@orbita1.ru said:
> IMHO Voyagers are too old and big machines to get (working) APM, and
> visws have no BIOS or limited BIOS emulation. 

That depends what you mean by `apm'.  In kernel/apm.c, it's tied to the 
existence of the APM bios and since voyagers have no bios per say (they 
actually have a SUS, which is an actively running boot OS on a tiny i386 
processor which can emulate a minimal PC bios when in PC mode) then you're 
correct.

Running Linux on a voyager, I can power off the machine, read the internal 
power source, the status of the front panel switch and even trigger a power 
management shutdown after the AC power is lost for a certain length of time 
(voyagers usually have internal lead acid batteries).  The way it's currently 
set up, if I turn off the front panel switch, the machine will execute a clean 
shutdown and power itself off when the shutdown is finished.  (this is mainly 
done in the voyager_thread.c file, where it keeps a kernel daemon permanently 
monitoring the machine status, if you're interested).

The above are all traditional APM functions, I just don't need apm.c to do 
them.

However, apm.c is still in arch/i386/kernel, just in case, so I think 
mpparse.c should join it, and we should keep all the other pieces (bootflag.c 
and acpi.c) in there just in case.

James