Martin Husemann wrote:
> Which job is that?
> And it can't be a generic way - it's i386 centric.

Oh, it's even worse than that: tpb is ThinkPad centric (it reads the 
eprom to detect lcd panel brightness changes, special key presses etc.) 
and nvram-wakeup only works on some modern mainborads.

The mc146818 chip however, is generic in the sense that it is used for 
many different things (RTC for instance).

I believe that many other bios vendors store similar information in this 
area and thus I see the nvram driver as a way to avoid writing specific 
drivers each time.

-- 
Cyrille