“At long last, it looks like there is an adequate solution to the Active State Power Management (ASPM) problem in the Linux kernel , a.k.a. the well-known and wide-spread power regression in the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which has been causing many laptops to go through significantly more power than they should. This is not another workaround, but rather a behavioral change in the kernel to better decide when the PCI Express ASPM support should be toggled.”
After reading this, I am never going to buy Gigabyte again. You tell your customers to change their OS because you are too lazy to do anything about? Yea, screw that. I don’t mean you have to fix it, but don’t tell me that I need to switch to Windows as your defacto response. I will just not buy your crappy hardware.
Not this shit again… As usual Michael Larabel didn’t do due diligence and went directly for the sensationalist bullshit “article”. If you actually have read what he posted it’s plainly obvious he got bottom level script reading cubicle critter probably working in Mumbai that has no clue what he’s talking about because it’s not in the script.
Had he followed through with requesting a higher level tech or manager or asked one of the Intel or AMD OSS devs or media staff to see if they can hook him up with the relevant contact info we’d have actually gotten a useful bit of information instead of yet another reason to hate Phoronix as the blight on the Open Source community that Michael Larabel has made it…
Gigabyte is one of the biggest backers of the Coreboot(Formerly LinuxBIOS) http://www.coreboot.org/ but like EVERY mobo manufacturer out there never expressly states anything other then the current version of Windows as being supported, for anything else you are on your own, which is usually fine on the desktop since it’s pretty easy to find out what all is on the board and look up if it has OSS drivers so everything from Haiku to Plan9 will boot. Mobile is still another story entirely and things are always a little sketchy if you don’t get something from from Zareason or System76.
If this bothers you friend stick with AMD CPUs. AMD has already announced their future boards will be built around coreboot which is FOSS. For the first time you’ll have the possibility of having the entire machine from the BIOS up completely open to modification if that is your desire.
As for TFA? Its an OEM thing and NOT a Windows thing. I have run into plenty of OEM boards with corners cut that certain versions of Windows wouldn’t run either without serious hacks or workaround because some PHB thought it would be a great idea to leave critical settings out of the BIOS. Who can forget such classics as the Sony laptops that had Intel chips that support VT but had it turned off in BIOS with NO way to turn it back on, or the lovely eMachines units where you HAD to have perfectly matched RAM or it wouldn’t read one slot because it would automatically try to go into dual mode with two chips, again with NO way to change it?
The key is to stick with OEMs that give you plenty of options like ECS and Asus and if you care about openness go AMD with coreboot. Otherwise you are rolling the dice.
That is not how I would put it. As I understand it they will deliver the people and documentation necessary so that coreboot can be used on all their boards.
It’s surprising that Matthew Garrett would have to divine this information from a Microsoft presentation on Vista’s handling of PCI Express. In his e-mail to the list Mr. Garrett also says that there is “zero public documentation” on this issue. I can believe that, often engineering specs are not public and must be bought from the standard body.
But I would have expected that at least one of the commercial GNU/Linux big shots, i. e. RH, Canonical, SUSE, had done so. Apparently not!
Well, sometimes you can’t buy the specs because they don’t exist or aren’t followed by the hardware makers. And sometimes the information cannot be disclosed publicly. Put all this together and the “zero public documentation” makes perfect sense.
The mistake you’re making here is to assume that there’s any external documentation at all. _OSC is well defined, but the precise semantics of how hardware vendors expect it to work isn’t. The FADT bit is moderately well defined, but again the precise semantics of how hardware vendors expect it to work isn’t. ASPM itself is well defined, but… you get the picture. And often even the hardware vendors don’t really know how it all works, they just know that they configured a machine in a specific way with a specific set of firmware configuration options and everything worked as they expected when they booted Windows.
The only really important specification here is how Windows behaves, and I doubt that’s documented anywhere other than the Windows source code. So we’re left trying to infer how things are meant to work by a combination of trying different things until something seems to work for everyone.
/rant on
So, I am an OS developer and I want to read the latest and greatest PCI Express spec.
I go to http://www.pcisig.com/home
Click “Download specifications”
Click “PCI Express”
Click “PCIe base spec 3.0” on the right
Select the version without the change bar
End up on a login window, click “how to join”
Click “Join PCI-SIG”
And then I have to fill out a 10-pages paper form, stick it in an envelope along with a $3000 check (or equivalent mean of payment), and send everything to an address in the US.
Err… seriously ?
I understand the need to pay for a spec. I mean, it takes lots of time and money to write it and all. Sure, personally, I’d end up downloading and using it illegally anyway because I’m a hobby OSdever with no income and there’s no way I can put that kind of money on a personal project, but that’s not the point.
The point is, if they get $3000 per year and juridic entity who deals with them, can’t they come up with something… you know… faster and more secure than putting very large amounts of paper money in the postal circuit ?
It’s not as if wire transfers are something new. And for all I hate credit cards, maybe I’d trust PCI-SIG enough to give them my card information. But even though they have thought about the latter possibility, they make it extra cumbersome and insecure by asking you to call their system administrator on the phone for that. Without specifying at which hours he’s actually there.
I find it ironical that computer standards body, of all things, can still live in the beginning of the 20th century.
/rant off
Specification and implementations are never the same. Especially if the specifications are to vague.
Too bad I already switched to BSD…