On Wed, 26 Feb 2014, Leif Lindholm wrote:
no FDT. In this case, the VM implementation must provide ACPI, and the OS must be able to locate the ACPI root pointer through the UEFI system table.
For more information about the arm and arm64 boot conventions, see Documentation/arm/Booting and Documentation/arm64/booting.txt in the Linux kernel source tree.
For more information about UEFI and ACPI booting, see [4] and [5].
What's the point of having ACPI in a virtual machine? You wouldn't need to abstract any of the hardware in AML since you already know what the virtual hardware is, so I can't see how this would help anyone.
The point is that if we need to share any real hw then we need to use whatever the host has.
That's right.
I dislike ACPI as much as the next guy, but unfortunately if the host only supports ACPI, the Linux driver for a particular device only works together with ACPI, and you want to assign that device to a VM, then we might be forced to use ACPI to describe it.