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Version 5 of the ACPI specification brings in extensions allowing system designers to connect hardware components together in more different ways and to describe that to the OS kernel through ACPI tables in the BIOS. For that to work, though, the OS kernel must be updated to understand the ACPI 5 extensions and make use of them. Moreover, hardware components that will be enumerated through ACPI are often very similar to ones supported by the Linux kernel already via existing platform, SPI, or I2C drivers, so there is a challenge to re-use the existing driver code for the support of new devices with minimum amount of changes. That challenge has been addressed by recent work resulting in a number of kernel modifications scheduled for inclusion into v3.8. I will describe those modifications and show how driver writers and users can benefit from them.
