> Thankfully, ACPI is now appearing on higher end ARM stuff (servers like ThunderX, workstations like Overdrive, hopefully the new Microsoft always-connected laptops?)

I can't believe anyone would be thankful about ACPI. Is there a machine with ACPI that isn't broken in some way? My brand new Lenovo, which multiple sites have crowned the "best" PC laptop, ships with a LTE card that can't properly power down, and causes PCI-E ASPM to be disabled. Even Microsoft has f--ked up power management repeatedly in the Surface line.

Power management on PCs is such a disaster that it calls into question the very idea of doing power management for computers built out of mix-and-match components through standards like ACPI.

I dunno. I've worked with a bunch of different ARM chips and each one's workflow is "build a kernel, build an initrd, then use this magic tool to get our boot ROM to load it" and that's always been gross & dumb.

I'm not necessarily cheery about ACPI in practice, but ACPI & UEFI in theory provide some kind of substrate to manage the platform, that's not just whatever the engineers are some shop cooked up this time.

Thanks to Flattened Device Trees, you don't have to build special per device kernels, you can just have a generic kernel that includes drivers for all the SoCs.

But having individual drivers per SoC in the kernel for things like power management still sucks.