[PATCH 0/2] ACPI: processor / EC enablement for core i7 platforms

[Alex Chiang]

Hi,

I'm probably bungling this up quite a bit, as it's my first
Ubuntu-specific patch submission, so I'm sure I missed a few of the
conventions.

Anyhow, I'd like to propose these two patches for Karmic, but if not
Karmic, then at least for Lucid (and I can redo the backport).

The first one is important: it will enable many new laptops with Intel
Core i7 processors to idle much cooler and turns on TurboBoost. We
discovered a common BIOS bug; lots of BIOS writers are specifying a C2
latency greater than what Linux accepts (100us). As a result, Linux
doesn't take advantage of the available C-states, idles much hotter, and
rarely engages TurboBoost. Removing the check enables all that good
stuff.

Len told me on irc that he plans on marking it for -stable, but hasn't
gotten around to it yet.

The second one is a little uglier. I discovered that some platforms need
to evaluate the _PDC method before initializing the EC. This early
evaluation loads some dynamic SSDTs and allows EC init to succeed.

So I wrote the patches for upstream without really thinking of
backporting issues... and did a whole lot of code movement and cleanup
as well. I also discovered after the fact that there are other BIOSes
out there with landmines if you try and do early _PDC (I can explain
more if necessary). Anyway, Len asked me to make it an opt-in feature
given that upstream is currently in .33-rc4, which made sense.

The patch prevents ACPI initialization errors on many new HP Core i7
laptops, and allows other users to also try to opt-in for early _PDC as
well, if they are getting ACPI namespace undef errors.

To make a long story short(er), I cherry-picked the 3 patches (out of
the 14 upstream ones) that actually enable the platforms, and left out
all the code cleanup stuff.

Hopefully that makes sense. Like I said, I'd like to see these patches
in Karmic, as there are lots of users out there that would be helped
today, and I'd want to seem them carried for Lucid too, since that's .32
based and my patches went into .33-rcx.

If I totally botched this submission, I can reworkk them. Just let me
know what needs to happen.

Thanks,
/ac