Custom DSDT--The Debian Way?

David Goodenough david.goodenough at btconnect.com
Tue Dec 21 11:42:49 UTC 2004


On Monday 20 December 2004 12:52, David Mandelberg wrote:
> David Goodenough wrote:
> > Until recently building ones own kernel for a laptop was
> > almost required in order to get it to work properly, and
> > actually one of the reasons for this was the ACPI support
> > which seemed to take a while to get into the kernel.  But
> > recently I have set up two laptops with Debian, and both
> > of them are running stock kernels.  Yes on both of them
> > I have had to add in some modules (the madwifi driver for
> > Atheros wireless support), but that is done without modifying
> > the base kernel.
>
> I don't know about pre 2.4, but from what I remember it's been easy to get
> GNU/Linux (i.e. bash, gcc, binutils, coreutils, linux, ...) to run on
> x86_32 laptops. The hard part was getting acpi, pcmia, wireless, and other
> things commonly useful on laptops.

I would agree that to get a basic console mode kernel has been relatively
easy for some years.  The particular problems I was referring to were things
like video chips (SIS chips for instance) and as you say acpi, pcmcia,
wireless and sensors.

However this merely re-enforces my point that people now do not need
to build their own kernel, and having a duff DSDT is no good reason to have
to start if there is a good alternative such as appending the modified DSDT 
to the initrd image.

David




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