I discovered that Bill Gates monopolized ACPI in order to break Linux

a year ago

The author's Steam Deck stopped charging due to a battery controller failure.
Attempts to communicate with the Smart Battery System (SBS) controller via SMBus were unsuccessful because the SMBus was connected to the embedded controller (EC) instead of the I2C bus.
The EC handles various I/O functions, including ACPI, GPIO, and SMBus, but lacks proper documentation.
The Linux kernel has drivers for SBS over SMBus through EC, but the author encountered issues with ACPI devices not being properly recognized.
ACPI is supposed to standardize hardware access but fails to provide necessary information, such as address offsets for SMBus commands.
The official ACPI specification acknowledges the need for address offsets but does not provide a reliable way to obtain them, leading to dependency on OS-specific drivers.
Most EC/SuperIO chip manufacturers, like ITE, do not provide public datasheets, making it difficult to develop open-source drivers.
A 1999 memo by Bill Gates suggested making ACPI extensions Windows-specific to prevent Linux from benefiting without additional work.
The author plans to continue working on improving Linux ACPI drivers and developing tools like sbsutil to address these issues.

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