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Two questions:

1. How does the kernel detect the conflict?

> you can certainly boot with acpi=off if you want to and no ACPI code will be executed at runtime

2. How does the kernel prevent the firmware from running anything?

ACPI firmware is not code that runs by itself. It is code that the kernel interprets. If the kernel doesn't interpret it, it won't run. SMM firmware runs by itself but also can't interact with ACPI locks anyway.

For (1) - ACPI is how the kernel knows what addresses maps where. And when a driver claims the same address space, it knows there's a conflict

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