apmd rpm missing

[Robert G. (Doc) Savage]

On Mon, 2010-10-18 at 21:45 +0100, James Wilkinson wrote:
> Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:
> > While comparing installed F13 rpms on a 32-bit laptop with a 64-bit
> > laptop I found that apmd is not installed on the 64-bit machine. After
> > trying to install it with yum I found that there are apmd rpms in
> > Everything/i386 and Everything/source but not in Everything/x86_64. It's
> > not just missing in my local repo -- it's missing in the
> > Everything/x86_64 directory at download.fedora.redhat.com. I tried
> > rebuilding the source rpm on the 64-bit machine and was abruptly advised
> > "error: Architecture is not included: x86_64". There's no clue in 'man
> > apmd'.
> > 
> > Is there more to this story?
> 
> At a quick guess, ACPI is the Chosen Successor to APM, and has been
> since well before x86-64 was introduced. So even if APM could be made to
> work on x86-64, I don’t think anyone bothered, and you can be pretty
> sure that the BIOS side will never have been tested.
> 
> http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/SMP-HOWTO.html:
>     APM and SMP are not compatible, and your system will almost
>     certainly (or at least probably ;)) crash while booting if APM is
>     enabled (Jakob Oestergaard). Alan Cox confirms this : 2.1.x turns
>     APM off for SMP boxes. Basically APM is undefined in the presence of
>     SMP systems, and anything could occur. 
> 
> Yes, this applies for multi-core and multi-thread processors, too.
> 
> On the other hand, Fedora still supports 32 bit systems from the last
> century, when BIOS support for ACPI could be extremely sketchy. So APM
> can be a useful (working) fallback.
> 
> Hope this helps,

James,

Excellent answer. Thanks very much.

--Doc