[openbeos] DMI - bus manager?
- From: Cian Duffy <myob87@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 2 Apr 2005 17:14:31 +0100
Hi all - some rambling musings here....
The Linux kernel., and possibly others, include a system to get data
from the SMBIOS/DMI for use in drivers (and in system identification)
BeOS has no such interface provided in the system - the only utils to
get DMI data are in userland.
However, its a damn useful system. The driver for the backlight on my
Sony Vaio works over ACPI, and hence has no PCI ids to detect wheter
the device is present to initiliase itself
At the moment, I get around this by manually rescanning the driver,
but this is inelegant and crude. The Linux driver checks the DMI data
for the Manufacturer 'Sony Corporation' and a prefix of 'PCG-' on the
Product Name.
R1 should include some way of getting DMI data, and I was wondering
wheter this could done by providing a DMI bus manager, which a driver
would load in much the same way as they load the ACPI bus manager.
A userland utility, or some other way that a userland application can
access the DMI data should also be provided, as details such as the
product name/model and other details can be useful - one thing I
thought of is that DMI tells you how many PCMCIA slots are fitted and
gives details on them that the current BeOS PCMCIA-CS port (which I
presume Haiku will use, eventually) can't give. These could be used
for a nicer userland configuration tool. And thats just one example.
Would that setup be feasible? It certainly seems like a far more
BeOS-friendly way of implementing it than any others I can currently
think of.
Cian/MYOB
--
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"We're busy running out of time"
Bernard Sumner, 1993
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