On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 11:27:17PM +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
We can only take this Fedora principle so far. There are many bits
of
code in the kernel which work around broken ACPI / BIOS behaviour (as
you well know, sorry for the egg-sucking lesson). If we were being
really annoying literalists we (well, rather 'kernel developers' than
'we', but many of them are Fedora / RH people) would never do this; we'd
close all the bugs with a note to the reporter to go and get their
motherboard manufacturer to fix it. Being sensible people, we recognize
there really *is* a limit to the 'we shouldn't work around brokenness'
argument, and it comes when the brokenness is in the hands of such
capricious souls as hardware manufacturers. The systems where holding
down a key during boot doesn't bring up grub are badly designed systems,
this is perfectly true. But still, the sensible path is to make
reasonable accommodations for this sort of thing. Let's face it, if
we're waiting on Sony or HP to fix this, we'll be waiting a while.
Or, alternatively, we can actually look into the problem and determine
whether there's an elegant way of handling it.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59(a)srcf.ucam.org