A word of support for Nate Lawson...

Folks,
   I've said this to Nate in person, but I think that perhaps it's worth
making the point to a wider audience.

   I'm really impressed, and very happy from FreeBSD's perspective that
Nate's working as hard and as successfully as he has on ACPI support.
 From a technical standpoint, it's a difficult problem even with Intel's
immeasurable contribution to the effort.

   However, it's on the where-does-this-affect-FreeBSD front that ACPI
is really significant.  Without working ACPI support, FreeBSD will not
run properly on a wide range of modern hardware.  If that should come to
pass, the system will have degenerated to the bad old days where you had
to have The Right Motherboard and The Right SCSI Controller and The
Right Disk and The Right Mouse.

   Don't take this as an attack on ACPI's detractors, or on the FreeBSD
developers that aren't working on the code; I just want to offer my
thanks and admiration to Nate (and for that matter all of the acpi-jp
folks, Intel's contributors very much included) for the work that's in
a very real and concrete sense keeping FreeBSD alive for tomorrow.

  = Mike

On Dec 5, 2003, at 10:44 AM, Nate Lawson wrote:

> A general FYI for ACPI users...  I work on FreeBSD on the bus each day 
> and
> a few hours on the weekend so I can't address every individual problem
> report.  My main focus with that time is to implement and bring in new
> code that fixes whole classes of problems.  There's still too much not
> implemented to spend a lot of time tracking down individual bugs, 
> although
> I do pay attention to them.  My hope is that fixing known inadequate 
> parts
> will take care of more bugs in less time than investigating every 
> problem
> report serially.
>
> Thanks,
> -Nate
>