Foxconn, ACPI fail, and leaving money on the table
Further Foxconn fun from Matthew Garrett explains the situation in detail. No intentional breakage of Linux here.)
This Ubuntu Forums thread got picked up by Slashdot and others. One Foxconn motherboard, not advertised with Linux support, has ACPI that doesn't work under the poster's version of Linux.
So, no Linux support, no mention of Linux in the ACPI tables, right? No, the Linux entry points to broken data.
Did Foxconn actually break ACPI? Maybe what they have on the board really did work at some point— possibly with an earlier board or an earlier release of Linux—and they just didn't test it with the right hardware and a newer Linux. Testing with Linux once doesn't necessarily mean that it will work again later.
So what's the answer? As far as I can tell, the best available word is: Motherboard vendors, don't code for Linux, and Linux, for ACPI purposes, pretend to be some kind of Microsoft Windows.
Matthew Garrett writes, about the whole Foxconn brouhaha, "Linux hasn't claimed to be Linux in response to OSI queries since 2.6.24, so this is an interesting sidenote but basically irrelevant." Of course, 2.6.24 only came out this January, so a lot of users are still running old kernels that do say they're Linux.
What a mess. Why support Linux at all?
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