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ACPI Forced On & Option Disabled in WinXP-Certified Motherboards
stealth_zipper asks: "I just got off the phone with a rep from Soyo Computer Inc trying to get the ability to change IRQs for the onboard hardware. It turns out that because of a deal to get WindowsXP certification, the Dragon-series motherboard ended up having the ability of Enabling/Disabling ACPI in the BIOS disabled. Now FreeBSD has complications with multiple devices on the same IRQs (especially sound, video, and nic all off the same one). Is there a way to get around this for new hardware? Has anyone else encountered this?" Why in the world does XP need this feature disabled, and are there workarounds to get OSes like FreeBSD working properly with motherboards of this sort?
wouldn't this easily add to their antitrust case?
microsoft makes so many smart moves.
Runnin' On Empty
ok this is just insane! so microsoft can influence the IHVs too? >sigh< i guess the answer "don't buy it" isn't viable? how about we get some l33t hardware dudes into it and see if they can't fix it :)
Are you sure that's the problem? These boards are having *tons* of problems, the P4 ones in particular.
I work at a computer shop in Wisconsin and we've gone so far as to stop carrying them because of the problems.
DOA.... bad slots.... bad ps/2 ports... "nothing after POST"... you name it.
I'd just make sure that it's ACPI causing the problem and not a defective board.
-kwishot
Learn the basics of ACPI, and some more, at acpi.info, webopedia, and Microsoft
Its kind of funny because WinXP has had problems with stuff like this. On my Biostar motherboard (Sloat A Athlon), WinXP couldn't shut off the computer. It would shut down, except hte fans (all LEDs off, etc) and then the computer would turn back on again! I had to manually power it down. The most recent XP patches finally fixed it. If Microsoft can't figure out how to properly turn th computer off, can they be trusted to use ACPI to put one to sleep :) :) :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I'm sure some crafty devil will do a bios hack...
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
Is it possible that the reason they couldn't get XP certification because they're not following the standard properly?
The only reason I ask is that it seems like we'd see more reports of other motherboards having trouble.
"Derp de derp."
If it isn't a product you can use, send it back. Enough people use OSes besides Windows XP nowadays, if they can't use this hardware and get their money back the seller will notice.
if you can't send it back?
Linux 2.4.x has pretty stable (if limited) support for ACPI extensions.
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
I have a hard time believing that this wasn't done expressely to make it harder for alternate OSes to get to work properly. I recall reading on a Linux newsgroup about needing to switch off ACPI for some configuration problem or something (I think it was X, but it's kind of a haze)...
:-)
So maybe we'll see a truce in the Linux/*BSD feud over this one...
Reminder: find a new sig
XP doesn't require ACPI to be disabled on all boards, far from it. This is quite an incorrect leap to assume that because some random tech says they needed to ditch ACPI to get XP certified, that XP cannot work with ACPI.
The best board to get right now are the MSI Athlon boards. XP certified, fast as crap, rock solid.
Buying shitty hardware may save you some money up front, but you'll pay through the teeth down the road.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I'd be more worried about the first line in the section titled "Device Class-specific Requirements" which states that audio devices must implement Digital Rights Management, since XP supports it.
Yeah, the devices will still work without it, but I wonder what concessions the manufacturers might make in order to derail SSSCA?
You get what you pay for ...
ACPI has been disabled on the last 5 or so motherboards I've seen (work computers I've built, etc..) It hasn't been much of a problem (other than incompatibilities with sucky sound blaster audigy drivers) but then again, I don't run linux.
Yes, it's required for XP-- and it was greatly encouraged for 2000 Pro-- ironically, turning ACPI off fixed a lot of problems I was having with my KT7A-RAID board.
New bios revisions of existing boards sometimes disable this, so watch out!
Some more popular motherboards have "hacks" that can add this functionality back.
Try looking for an "unofficial" support forum for Soyo or whatever.
Go here for the best KT7 faq which answers all these questions for that board, but provides interesting ACPI info, as well.
-
Because ACPI is deprecated, in favour of APM. Is that a good enough reason? God forbid we should actually move forward and embrace new standards.
Good try, but in fact the reverse is true: APM is deprecated, and ACPI is the new standard.Some of the things that Microsoft has forced us to change in the past few years include:
- One of our main products was in full compliance with the IEEE
specification for the USB interface. However, because Windows 2000 used a
while() loop for a timing operation, it was sometimes flaky when dealing
with our product. As a result, we needed to re-engineer an ASIC (this was
damn expensive) to make it compatible. The original version, of
couse, was fully compatible with Linux.
- Normally Windows communicates in a little-endian fashion. However, for
two particular device status operations, Windows inexplicably violates yet
another published spec and forces the device into big-endian (mac fag)
mode. We needed to change firmware to fix this, and delay the release of
our product by 3 weeks.
- Microsoft required that the source code to our Windows drivers got
audited in order for the product to be approved. Hmm, why don't they let
us audit their code?
Naturally, though, since the DoJ has dropped the ball on Microsoft, this sort of thing will only get worse. Get used to it, and vote Democratic in 2004.Bill
This link says nothing about disabling the ACPI feature in the BIOS, all it says is that the board must be fully ACPI compliant.
I would view this as more of a Soyo issue than a MS issue.
If Soyo chose to take the option away, that's Soyo's decision...and has no bearing on the "XP Readiness" of the board.
The text in question:
------
"Power management, docking station support, and Plug and Play capabilities for ***mobiles*** must be wholly ACPI-based, as APM support has been removed from Windows XP. [A3.4.7]
Desktop system support required for S3 and Fast Boot capabilities, based on Windows XP advances for ACPI-compliant power management. [A1.4.2]
Desktop and server systems must implement ACPI-based APIC support, because of how Windows NT®-based operating systems process interrupts. [A1.4.11]
ACPI-based support for multiprocessor systems, based on Windows XP/Windows Whistler Server support. [A1.4.12]
PCI-based network adapters for desktop systems must support wake from D3 cold, to ensure correct system-wide support for wake from sleep states supported under Windows XP. [B7.1.4.4]"
-kwishot
Sir, you have misinterpreted the information suggested on that [cknow.com] link. APM was superceeded by ACPI. ACPI defines a wider range of power and system status related functions. There is an interpreter, and the ACPI spec is well defined.
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
I write video drivers for a living, and we have had nothing but problems with our software on the Dragon series of motherboards. In certain cases, the chipset is rejecting known configuration registers for AGP bus width, etc., which on some of our products causes the beta-level drivers we provide to bluescreen.
;-)
Some of our senior engineers have been in contact with their engineers, and they seem to be telling us the problem is ours, though we are following their specs to a tee.
Why can't it be easy like it did in the days where you supported a few int 10h BIOS calls? (sigh) Now that was cutting-edge for 1989!
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
hehe, they are trying to get a monopoly in the "automatic turning off of your computer" buisness. =)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
If you read the article it says "It turns out that because of a deal to get WindowsXP certification, the Dragon-series motherboard ended up having the ability of Enabling/Disabling ACPI in the BIOS disabled."
This means that ACPI is always ON, not off.
Seems like the perfect time for BSD to enter the 21st century.
:)
Seriously, ACPI is the wave of three years ago. It's a better interface in many ways, especially since (in theory) it eliminates the painful IRQ merrygoround we all rode back in 1997.
The choices here appear to be adapt, abort or avoid. I'd choose the latter. But then again, I'm running OSX anyway so it's a moot point
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I totally aggree. http://www.nerdtreehouse.com
Mine was giant and yellow. Slashdot is going to force me to spend money on "something" with this new ad system, either a new monitor for a higher res, a new mouse cause the wheel is gonna break, or they are going to give me a free subscription.... I don't see any of these happening, and besides, my comment is completely off topic so far. But since I am a Linux user, and have had just about as much contact with Windows aXe Pee as I need, (read seen screenshots and used win2k) I really don't have much input as to how people put their computers to sleep, mine run all the time, but that is mainly due to nfs samba and my webserver nevermind playing RTCW....
I don't know why this is a problem. If you frequent the mobo forums, you'll see users asking questions left and right on how to disable ACPI. Why are people clamoring now for a BIOS option to be activated just so they'll clamor for on how to disable it?
Rereading the blurb I realized that they're switching ACPI off by default, so that would actually solve that X (or something) problem I was referring to. I take it all back. Microsoft is great and Bill Gates has nice hair (now). FreeBSD sucks.
:-)
...just kidding!
Reminder: find a new sig
ACPI is also for hardware configuration. However, it's a monster of a standard, and very few vendors have working, correct ACPI support in the BIOS. I'm not entirely sure why, but more and more boards these days are being configured by the BIOS to put any and all PCI cards on the exact same IRQ (usually 10 or 11), regardless of how many other IRQs are unused. Thankfully, PCI IRQ sharing is working better and better these days. I remember the days of Win95, where there were 5 filled PCI slots, who wanted 7 IRQs, and there were 3 IRQs free, and none of the cards particularily wanted to share IRQs with anything else. One hardware change, accidental or not, and Windows won't even boot anymore (and occasionally the SCSI BIOS would hang because of the IRQ conflict).
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
especially when faced with such credible threats as GNOME and Nautilas on the desktop.
I figured it out. I think he means ACPI support is always enabled and can't be disabled. That makes sense.
One guy said APM took over from ACPI and that's just the other way around....ACPI is the new standard.
Gorkman
Why in the world does XP need this feature disabled, and are there workarounds to get OSes like FreeBSD working properly with motherboards of this sort?
MS wanting a feature disabled that makes a board incompatible with other operating systems? My god, what a coincidence!
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
It seems many people are misreading the article. The poster said, that the **ability** to Enable/Disable it is no longer present, NOT that it is actually disabled.
That's a big difference.
In the shortest way I can explain it, changing ACPI from on to off or vice versa on a current install of Windows 2000 or XP will... "fuck shit up." A more detailed description of how/why "shit gets fucked up" follows:
In Windows, peripheral component interconnect (PCI) devices can share IRQs. In accord with the Plug and Play capability that is defined by the PCI specification, adapters are configured by the computer BIOS and are then examined by the operating system and changed if necessary. It is normal behavior for PCI devices to have IRQs shared among them, especially on Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) computers that have Windows ACPI support enabled.
In Windows XP, Device Manager may list some or all of the devices on your ACPI motherboard as using the same IRQ (IRQ 9). (To view the list of resources, click either Resources by type or Resources by connection on the View menu). No option is available to change the IRQ setting. Windows takes advantage of the ACPI features of the motherboard, including advanced PCI sharing. The PCI bus uses IRQ 9 for IRQ steering. This feature lets you add more devices without generating IRQ conflicts.
Note that Windows XP cannot rebalance resources in the same way that Microsoft Windows 98 does. After PCI resources are set, they generally cannot be changed. If you change to an invalid IRQ setting or I/O range for the bus that a device is on, Windows XP cannot compensate by rebalancing the resource that was assigned to that bus.
Windows XP does not have this ability because of the more complex hardware schemas that Windows XP is designed to support. Windows 98 does not have to support IOAPICs, multiple root PCI buses, multiple-processor systems, and so on. When you are dealing with these hardware schemas, rebalancing becomes risky and therefore is not implemented in Windows XP except for very specific scenarios. However, PCI devices are required to be able to share IRQs. In general, the ability to share IRQs does not prevent any hardware from working.
The Plug and Play operating system settings in the computer BIOS do not generally affect how Windows XP handles the hardware. However, Microsoft recommends that you set the Plug and Play operating system setting to No or Disabled in the computer BIOS. For information about viewing or modifying the computer BIOS settings, consult the computer documentation or contact the computer manufacturer.
Manually assigning IRQs to PCI slots in the system BIOS as a troubleshooting method may work on some non-ACPI systems that use a standard PC hardware abstraction layer (HAL), but these settings are ignored by Plug and Play in Windows if ACPI support is enabled. If you need to manually assign IRQ addresses through the BIOS to a device on an ACPI motherboard, you must reinstall Windows to force the installation to use a Standard PC HAL. For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
More info can be found he'a...
xp is built on 2k. wasnt having an ACPI compliant motherboard part of 2k's system requirements?
Did anyone else see the large ad under the post before the comments? It only loads sometimes for me. If thats what the ads are going to be it isn't allt hat bad. I was expecting annoying popups and popunders. I can live with that little square there.
I have an HP Pavilion zt1180 laptop with similar wierdness. Runs linux fine but forget about sound. Also there is no way to set the video memory (it has a shared memory system) without windows xp so removing in entirely is out of the question. I've been trying to get to the right group at HP to acquire the specs on this bios so that it would be possible (for someone more skilled than I) to write the necessary driver / interface to modify these settings. So far i've had no success.
Today in breaking news Microsoft alleged that it was technically impossible to remove WindowsXP from *any* computer. Further, they insist that WindowsXP cannot be removed from small children that have been exposed to their products or other software products that might have been located on the same shelf. They also announced that WindowsXP will be shipping as the default OS of all Mr. Coffee brand coffeemakers and blenders :)
Geez...now even our hardware isn't safe.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
First of all, ACPI was created to a) make computers that "boot" instantly by always being in sleep mode and b) end the IRQ conflicts so common with earlier versions of Windows and hardware. So yes, ACPI, when working right, simply rocks.
However, ACPI on certain motherboards, especially AMD motherboards, can cause severe system instability with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. (Please note that these OSes don't freeze/BSOD under normal circumstances, so if you're seeing this, you probably have a hardware issue which could be related to ACPI.)
The most common scenario I have seen is this:
-- Someone decently technically savvy builds his/her own PC with an AMD chip;
-- Said person installs Windows XP;
-- Said person wonders why IRQs are all set to 9;
-- Said person goes and manually messes with IRQ settings, thus wreaking havoc on the poor commputer that functioned perfectly before.
It can also go the other way:
-- Said person installs Windows XP with AMD chip;
-- Said person experiences weird freezes;
-- Said person's computer works fine with Windows 98 because Win98 doesn't have full ACPI support, so person is left wondering why everyone says that Windows 2000 and Windows XP are so stable since that person's computer crashes constantly.
To turn off ACPI, reinstall Windows and set your computer type to "Standard PC." Here is an excellent guide on how to set your PC to a Standard PC. As mentioned in the guide, this gives you the added benefit of increased framerates in Quake 3. However, you have to manually turn your computer off, and it might not go into powersave mode properly. Here is another comment regarding ACPI.
So, to summarize:
-- If you're having problems with Windows 2000/XP freezing, try this fix. Freezes are indicative of a hardware issue. Your computer should be stable with these OSes (except for application crashes, which happen with every OS.) My current uptime with Windows 2000 is 27 days; I have seen over 100 days uptime. If you're not seeing this type of stability with 2000/XP, it's time to do some hardware diagnostics.
-- If you're not having problems, leave well enough alone and leave ACPI turned on.
-- Do NOT mess with your IRQs on an ACPI computer! By messing with IRQs manually, you're asking for weird system problems. Leave them all on 9 -- it won't hurt the computer.
-- Due to the problems mentioned above, I personally will not buy AMD chips and motherboards. I have yet to see ACPI problems crop up on an Intel motherboard. It's unfortunate, because I like AMD and like to encourage competition, but their chips and motherboards have strange issues that have yet to be resolved.
I hope this helps all of you who are having problems with Windows XP or 2000.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
I've got a Soyo K7V DRAGON+ and I'm using Windows2000/XP (I've installed back and forth between them trying to decide which I like better) and Linux-Mandrake 8.1.
My Cmedia 8738, GeForce 3 Ti 200, Via (Rhine) Ethernet, and three USB controller hubs are all on IRQ7. All the devices work great in both Windows and Linux.
As I somehow doubt the Dragon+ was purchased as a Server board, why not just use Linux which works properly?
You could run FreeBSD in VMWare if you really can't do without it.
I had the same deal with my abit kt7a motherboard. I always took it as Microsoft trying to make people adopt something new as a standard...why enable ACPI if you don't have to? I've always had problems with things sharing the same IRQ, especially Soundblaster products.
The good thing is that with my motherboard, at least, the feature was hidden by default, but could be re-enabled via a modification of the BIOS prior to patching. The down side is that with Windows 2000 at least you have to have ACPI turned off prior to the installation, and do a few extra things. Info on my board, at least, at www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm
I've got 5 devices running off of IRQ 9 and the thing is rock solid, never had a crash since early 2.4.0pre days._ 37.html#1">1999</a>
</p>
<p>
The Linux kernel has ACPI support in its future. It all started back in <a href=http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt19991004
</p>
<p>
Anyway check this out...
</p>
<p>
<tt>
[root@haemal]:/proc# cat interrupts
CPU0
0: 29750549 XT-PIC timer
1: 87289 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
3: 2 XT-PIC serial
5: 183414591 XT-PIC EMU10K1
8: 3 XT-PIC rtc
9: 1551326 XT-PIC acpi, usb-uhci, usb-uhci, eth0, eth1
10: 1318690 XT-PIC ide0
12: 2323801 XT-PIC PS/2 Mouse
14: 89064 XT-PIC ide2
15: 62 XT-PIC ide3
NMI: 0
LOC: 29751193
ERR: 46561
MIS: 0
</tt>
</p>
ayottesoftware.com
You know, after Klerck posts his 'page widening post', it shifts the ad out of visible view... and I'm viewing on 1280x1024 ... :D
It's not 'required' or 'forced', it's just strongly recommended. Chances are this shoddy vendor was close to not getting ceritifcation, and needed some brownie points.
And the reason why is that it makes XP run much better. Boot times, making Shut Down work properly, etc are all improved by ACPI. These are good things for customers.
Running OSs that don't support ACPI is not a major concern when trying to set guidelines for hardware that works best for XP. I don't see why Windows XP certification has to take into account the hardware support of other OS's? They are XP guidelines.
Is there a reason that ACPI can't be supported by a Free OS? Fill me in on the limitation.
----
Reboot the computer, go into the bios, see if you can 'reserve' IRQs. if you can, mark them ISA - that'll stop them from getting assigned to windows or OS. Then just reboot .... disabling the PNP features forces them to be reserved. As long as the OS can still talk to it, it'll be just fine.
I had problems with my new Pentium 4 compatible MotherBoard from BioStar, very dissapointing to see harsware vendors acting like this.
The problem was that i couldnt detect my SoundCard and CaptureCard with RedHat as always... but i felt more frustated when found that Windows 95, 98, 98SE and Me didnt work either, i tested XP and worked just fine. My frustation dont comes because i cant use microsoft 9x stuff, but is because vendors think they can get you to buy the new Windows just to be Certified .
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Now FreeBSD has complications with multiple devices on the same IRQs (especially sound, video, and nic all off the same one). Is there a way to get around this for new hardware?
Well, yeah, there is a way... you could install Windows 2000 Server...
And they'll all be happy on IRQ 9.
Or you could just wait for the FreeBSD folks to upgrade the kernel.
In fact, I assumed this was standard industry practice. I had been informed that to have a new motherboard windows compatible (not just XP, but any windows) you must be unable to control whether ACPI is enabled/disabled.
I bought my KT7A in April of last year, and got a SB Live, which had so many problems together it behoves me to think about it. The thing that ended up solving it was reinstalling windows without ACPI, since you can't control it in the BIOS anymore...
No big news here. Linux has sufficient ACPI support for most uses, as does FreeBSD. The full, nasty, evil interpreter may not work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I had a Dell Dimension XPS P3-600 a year back. Great machine, untill i put Win2k on it.
:)
Damn windows put freakin EVERYTHING on IRQ 9 per the ACPI capability. Only with the hardware I had, it made it VERY unstable even under 2k's supposed ACPI compatibility.
That's actually what made me switch to linux. Put RedHat on it and didnt have any issues.
Dell finally released a BIOS update that would allow you to disable ACPI, IIRC. But, it was already too late
I've got 5 devices running off of IRQ 9 and the thing is rock solid, never had a crash since early 2.4.0pre days and it probably wasn't because of an IRQ problem.
The Linux kernel has ACPI support in its future and it all started back in 1999
Anyway check this out...
[root@haemal]:/proc# cat interrupts
CPU0
0: 29750549 XT-PIC timer
1: 87289 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
3: 2 XT-PIC serial
5: 183414591 XT-PIC EMU10K1
8: 3 XT-PIC rtc
9: 1551326 XT-PIC acpi, usb-uhci, usb-uhci, eth0, eth1
10: 1318690 XT-PIC ide0
12: 2323801 XT-PIC PS/2 Mouse
14: 89064 XT-PIC ide2
15: 62 XT-PIC ide3
NMI: 0
LOC: 29751193
ERR: 46561
MIS: 0
ayottesoftware.com
Screws you once: Take whatever they want from your code base and your license says it's okay.
Screws you twice: Push hardware standards that cripples platforms for competing OS installs.
Smart. Evil, but smart.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I found point 5 particularly interesting:
WL-5. System and components meet reduced legacy support goals
Linux advocates pride themselves on the ability of the system to run on old systems. However, there is an argument for getting rid of obselete technologies. While M$ windoz's requirement for top of the line system's smacks of promotion of consumerism for consumerism's sake, My question is this:
How do we compromise between supporting legacy systems, without slowing the pace of tech development in order to accomodate them?
Fisher-Price Operating System
Carl
Vote Libertarian
Honestly, how important is this sticker? "Designed for Windows XP" and "Windows XP Compatible" are totally different concepts. ... "The Geeks" are the most likely crowd to be putting an alternative operating system, such as linux, on their assembled system, and wouldn't care much about how "Designed for XP" their systems are.
This list of requirements (which, btw, doesn't force ACPI to be disabled) is for companies to market their products as "Designed for Windows XP"
Ok...who are the people buying motherboards and other parts separately so that they can put it all together themselves? "The Geeks"
The companies who I would picture to be most worried about having this sticker are companies who use completely proprietary systems with Windows XP pre-installs anyways (Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc) and need to market their systems as such. If that's the case... no one can complain about their system not being linux or anything compatible because they bought a "Designed for Windows XP" system. Designed for XP... preinstalled with XP... marketed with XP.
To sum it up... this sticker has a much lower value than one might think...the only people who need it are... the people who need it (make sense?)
-kwishot
That headline really needs to be changed. It should read something like "ACPI Forced On in WinXP Certified Mobos"
Also, did anyone else notice this little gem on the requirements page?
Does this mean hardware support for DRM in sound cards?
Like the dumb asses did to get clinton elected (which I was happy about) it reversed and got bush elected. Fucking idiot small parties. Work to change the larger party into the image you want. It doesn't work the other way around. Haven't you seen Italy? Worst political system ever.
in windows xp you can choose which kernel is installed and if you choose a non acpi one then you dont use acpi couldnt bsd do something like this?
First, this is totally insane - no ACPI? This means that I'm greeted by "it is now safe to shut down your computer" every time I tell Windows to shut down? Talk about circa '97. I absolutely refuse to use any PC that doesn't support ACPI in this day and age.
And second, don't totally blame Dragon for this. Win XP wreaks havoc with motherboards, IRqs, etc. It's almost as bad as the old Dos days, but at least back then, with ISA and Win95, we had more of a fighting chance via trial and error.
Case in point: I have an Epox 8KHA motherboard. Works great with Win2K. I added a second partition and installed XP. Once I installed the drivers for my Geforce2 card (from Windows Update, no less), WHAM! Blue Screen of Death. After hours of flashing my BIOS, and trying other drivers (both WHQL and Nvidia beta), I gave up and went back to 2K. I don't know what the hell MS did, but it sure screwed me up.
Why am I suddenly reminded of George W. Bush?
The implication of this statement is that Windows XP ACPI is not the same as ACPI. This explains a few things, like why every d**n ACPI BIOS out there violates the ACPI specs and must be patched in order to have a prayer of working with Linux. Of course, even when patched most laptops are working poorly at best.
This is clearly a ploy by MSFT to subvert a standard (of which they are a primary sponsor!) to the detriment of competing operating systems. I'm glad that they've stated it so clearly. Forward this to Bill Lockyer.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Of course, If you want to stick it to the man, you could do the reverse and Block MSIE from your Site.
Do some fucking research before you buy something!
Enter ACPI. A weighty specification that you can beat a mugger to death with. Big, juicy, complex data structures. States and modes out the wazoo.
All implemented by heroin-addled BIOS writers working in perpetual darkness, in a basement in Taiwan. Mmmmmm....bugs....
ACPI is Ballmer's last hope to return Windows users to the level of crappiness they love and expect.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
I know the article mentions WinXP (NT 5.1), but since Win2K is NT5.0 this is related:
I have a ECS K7S5A motherboard that I had to disable ACPI in the BIOS, otherwise Win2K would blue screen on setup -- this blue screen even tells you to press F7 at the setup screen "when it prompts press F6 for RAID devices" to *silently* disable ACPI support!
Can anyone enlighten me WTF does every device need to be on the same IRQ ?? What's wrong with having every device on it's own IRQ ??
I didn't even notice it, junkbuster already had the settings in it to block it. I didn't even have to reconfig anything. :)
It's been a WHQL requirement for years. I don't know about this motherboard, but on ABIT and Shuttle boards you can re-enable the ACPI option by flashing a modified BIOS. Yeah it's a little risky, but the program that edits the BIOS file is made by Award - it's the same program the MB manufacturers use to enable and disable other options.
Read here. Personally I don't think you should boycott SOYO, Abit, or any other manufacturer because they wanted to get WHQL..
Now I really, truly, mean no offense to your operating system when I say this. I don't write OS'es, and yes I have no idea how hard it is to write the low level code. But, the PCI spec has been around for close to ten years, and shared IRQ's have always been a (optional) capability for PCI devices. Initial devices had problems with shared IRQ's. But today with no ISA, and card manufacturers learning to play nice, shared IRQ's are a reality. Shouldn't your OS support them by now? I have 2 network cards, SCSI, and sound on the same IRQ right now, and it works fine in Red Hat 7.2 and Windows XP.
That means that the FreeBSD folks are behind the times and have a little work to do...
Okay..I'm probably going to get meta-moderated down quite a bit for what I've just mod'ed, but, people are talking out of their asses, I do believe. Soyo, starting with the Dragon, has turned it's company around. They may have been shoddy in the past, but the Dragon series is some of the BEST motherboards availible for AMD TBird/XP. Check out ANY review done by ANY hardware enthusiast site. Go, ask any hardware forum... www.hardforum.com www.arstechnica.com www.anandtech.com or whatever. The Dragons for P4 are a bit untested ATM, but for AMD-based systems, it's another thing altogether. I think I'm going to get mod'ed down for flaimbait, but, you know, slashdot users are kinda ignorant when it comes to the latest hardware, as seen by the often "oh look, here's a new thing" posts that refer to things that are old and redundant.
---
matt fucking fury
(and occasionally the SCSI BIOS would hang because of the IRQ conflict).
You see, that's your problem.
You keep insist on putting a SCSI card in the machine.
SCSI is obsolete. Your storage drives haven't needed to be interfaced over a 'smart controller card' since the motherboard's expansion stopped being through 8 MHz ISA slots.
Forget BSD. SCSI is indeed what is dead.
I'll be in the market for a new mobo in about a month and want to avoid anything crippled in their honor. Is anyone keeping a list?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
... is why you're buying a Soyo motherboard. Those things are pieces of fucking trash.
Doesn't anyone think the FreeBSD team should get their ACPI and IRQ sharing stuff worked out? Sure MS dictating hardware standards isn't good, but from a purely technical standpoint the problem here is FreeBSD.
The other side of it is that it causes issues with BSD, a non-GPL OS. One of the OSs MS actually shows some support for. Why does THIS make sense?
Further, I think it may demonstate a more insidious strategy for MS. The HW is configured in such a way that alternative OSs cannot use it. That's bad, that's very very bad. This could SEVERELY limit where Linux/BSD can be used.
OTOH, companies like IBM and other motherboard manf may come out with Linux-only lines and find a nice little niche market there...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
1980:
Bill Gates: I want no motherboard to work with any other software than windows!!!! Innovate!!!
Lackee: But sir, I use linux in a dual boot situation.
Bill Gates: I don't care!!! My company will rool joo!!!
Lackee: Yes sir. I will ensure that all manufacturers know this. You are king.
So after many years, after the advent of the linux kernel, we have this board, the first attempt by the monarchy that is Bill Gates to eliminate those who choose not to spend 299.99 plus tax on an operating system.
Next week, our experience with Steve Jobs.
(All instances of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs name don't actually refer to them. The time line of this story is slightly skewed. Anything else, you can comment on.)
My Abit KT7-RAID had the option hidden as well, and it wasn't until I enabled it so that I could turn off ACPI that my system finally got stable, even with win2k. I found Paul's KT7 FAQ invaluable. Specifically this item.
> Seems like the perfect time for BSD to enter the 21st century.
Actually, FreeBSD seems to be moving more towards Win2k-style ACPI support in -CURRENT (although that's more of a gut-feeling[tm] than a hard fact; I'm sure someone else can elaborate)
Aside from flaky hardware (which you can turn off in most cases), this is a Good Thing, although you can be sure you'll be able to turn it off in FreeBSD if the need arrises.
http://www.jp.freebsd.org/acpi/ seems to be about the best page I can find on this.
This must be the innovation Gates and Ballmer keep talking about trying to preserve; yes! I finally understand!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
the xp docs say apm is not supported. so it has to only have acpi support.
ACPI is another example of doing something easy to make something easy and screwing up an important case instead of doing something a little harder for the same benefit that doesn't screw up the side case.
Leaving all your PCI devices sharing a single IRQ doesn't hurt the computer in the sense of physically damaging it, but it does a hell of a job with interrupt latency.
Those of us who deal with latency problems under Windows anyway (like for real-time audio processing) notice that we can often get better than twice the performance of an ACPI Windows install with a Standard PC Windows install. The PCI devices can still share IRQs (that's a driver issue) and to boot - you get to pick the IRQs. Since not all IRQs are created equal, you basically get to put your devices in priority, so that if you have a device (that the aforementioned audio device) that needs its interrupts to be serviced ahead of everybody else, putting it by itself on IRQ 9 is a life saver. On my system I can run 24 24-bit audio channels with effects with 2ms latency most of the time, and 4ms worst case. With an ACPI install (and ACPI turned on in BIOS) I couldn't get under 20ms, and that was under the best of circumstances. Try to use a USB device, and you're easily over 100ms.
This is NOT an improvement!! IRQs were designed with priorities in mind for a reason. New specs shouldn't just allow hardware to share interrupts and then make the software deal with prioritization (which it does badly anyway) but should just do what we always do for addressing lines: add more.
BTW, not being able to turn off your system is FUD. You can enable APM on a non-ACPI install and still shut off your computer.
Just wanted to mention that the ACPI support in Linux 2.4.17 is a few months old. We are making progress *weekly*, and the latest patches are available at sf.net/projects/acpi . Bad BIOSes will always be a problem, and there's not much we can do about that, but help is still needed in stabilizing the Linux ACPI code (the core of which is also being used on *BSD).
Regards -- Andy
(Linux ACPI maintainer)
--Mike--
ACPI is not fully developed. Hardware is slightly head of software, but both don't seem to be totally standardized as far as I have heard (some multiprocesser boards need it, some laptops choke on it in Linux).
So, judging by the artical title, /. is shocked that XP is not ahead of Linux? That's an odd turn of events.
ACK! This is worse than I thought. Slashdot having more ads is one thing.. but ads from doubleclick?
I don't know if anyone realises, but it isn't like you just put doubleclick ads on your site and make money. You submit personal information to doubleclick about your users and you get MORE money.
Don't believe me? Vista altavista.com someday and do a search.. lets say I do a search for... "doubleclick sucks". On that page it will say, "
This is just ONE example, but on Altavista they submit what you search to doubleclick (which already tries to track who you are.).
So what, no doubleclick can spy on my browsing habbits, get personal information me, AND compare what I say on an online message board. This is fucked up, thank god I block ALL doubleclick sites from my junkbuster config.
most of this post was clipped from a MS site
it sounds to me more like "we didn't want to solve a hard problem so we made the problem space smaller".
and forces the device into big-endian (mac fag) mode
Hey now. That's also "Sun Fag", "IBM Fag", "MIPS Fag", "Alpha Fag" and even "Cray Fag" mode. Oh no mister bill, those dang homosexuals have corrupted the entire industry!
Hmm, why don't they let us audit their code?
Isn't it obvious? You can't accessorize.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
With ACPI enabled on Dell Laptops in the kernel, they will lock up on switching from battery to wall power or vice versa. Aparently (I could be wrong) at least in Linux you can disable it, reguardless of the BIOS... HOWEVER, if you are unaware of how to compile your own kernel WITHOUT APIC, or pass the option through LILO, your screwed. But, if you could disable it in the BIOS, that wouldn't be an issue.
According to Juan Quintela, the Linux Kernel maintainer for Mandrake Linux "Humm, but the owners of new ASUS boards & similar that have a Promise controller for IDE RAID on board (up machines) will not work without ioapic (the BIOS is also buggy, only that the other way around that the dell laptops). Will try to get noapic kernel option to just work."
Bottom line... Don't assume this is just a Windows XP problem with ACPI, it's just a problem.
From all I've heard, PCI devices (and their drivers) are supposed to be able to handle IRQ sharing. Now, it doesn't work when there are ISA devices (serial ports, floppy controllers, etc) trying to share IRQs..
I wonder if there's a different problem, such as IRQs being set to `edge' instead of `level' in the BIOS?
And, well, I hate to be an ass, but doesn't Linux handle this just fine?
Anyone want to finish the ACPI driver? It's big and complicated.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I've had 3 MSI Athlon boards fail in the last month. Honestly I can't say I'd use them.
While I do build systems, I'm not a reseller, so my pool of reference is rather limited, nonetheless, I find the Soyo Dragon+ AMD board to be the best MB I've ever purchased. Frankly, it wasn't until I read this thread that I realized that ACPI enable/disable was not an option. While I certainly frown on the lack of the option for the sake of an XP logo, this board is teriffic for linux. I've been using it for 4 months with an AMD 1.33 Ghz cpu, 512MB of DDR and a Geforce3. Nary an issue. The onboard audio is very high quality, and coupled with a solid onboard NIC, I use only a single slot (AGP for video), the rest are empty. While my SuSE 7.3 machine can't take advantage of IDE raid, I can use the 4 IDE ports to give my hard drive, zip, cd-rw and DVD each their own port with no master/slave port sharing. The machine is a triple boot with win2k (yes, serious sam doesn't run on linux so sue me) and red hat 7.2 and I've yet to have ANY stability issues. The 3rd boot option (rh7.2) has been blown off many times and recently had lycoris, mandrake 8.2 beta 2 and debian installed just for poking around, but no distro even skipped a beat. My headless samba server in the closet is a slot 1 Soyo board and its had an uptime of over 6 months without a reboot, and that was so I could blow off win2k and install linux/samba! Soyo boards used to be great, yet underrated. I have heard many resellers complain about the returb rate of recent Soyo boards, and I don't doubt its true. I've been lucky though, and if your board isn't defective, you won't have any complaints. linuxhardware.org gave the soyo dragon+ the nod in their rig of the year article (plugged here on /.) and I used the board for my article on linuxorbit.com (blatant plug) detailing the install config of a basic suse 7.3 machine (for newbie's only).
I've used only Abit and Soyo boards for the last 9 years, but this dragon+ is a great performer if your OS (not *BSD i suppose) supports the hardware.
Sorry, I seem to have put the two words in the wrong order, that's all. But the point still stands; before all, the article's title is misleading. Apparently, the ability to disable ACPI is disabled. Thus, ACPI must be enabled. The remainder of my argument is valid; if people cannot be coerced to embrace new standards by use of the carrot, then we must resort to the stick.
Gee, looks like somebody doesn't want
lol...
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As I have heard, Soyo redesigns their motherboards constantly, and this one that I have was only on the market for a few weeks. Many of them are actually defective, and I think that's the reason why they are such a bargin. If I were you, I would return it to wherever you got it and get a better brand, such as Asus. I don't think they went overboard with Microsoft, yet. I agree that I took a huge risk by purchasing a Soyo motherboard from Frys, but it works fine for me under Linux, and I can use multiple sound cards and video cards under the same IRQ, I guess I got lucky or something to not get a WinXP "certified" board, which is really just making sure a better future, for Microsoft. Really, I don't see the point of Microsoft demanding ACPI be turned permantly off, unless they have something to hide. Really, Microsoft has really became almost anal about this kind of stuff lately, and frankly, they're just being the control freaks they they usually are.
I'd refuse to certify Soyo motherboards, period.
Before crying "fire" and "panic" which I already see happening, realize that these boards are so flaky they should be avoided at all costs!
And perceptive readers will notice that we are getting the usual single, EXTREMLY biased side of the story. It's the classic slashdot BS. Don't swallow stupid vendor crap hook line and sinker every time folks. Sometimes vendors conviently forget to mention crucial parts of the story. Folks paying attention to the tech area should take claims by one side in a debate with more than a grain of salt. Christ, look at Kazza/Morpheus. You'd think editors would be even more careful.
Anyways, let's get a little more confirmation from the mobo makers such as Tyan/Abit/MSI etc.
If a device only generates an interrupt every second or two, but the CPU takes 500mSec to service that interrupt, that means that everything else using that IRQ is left out in the cold for that time. (This is the Interrupt Latency)... even a 1Ghz P4 won't be able to play sound without breaking up if this happens... which is just plain stupid.
Video, Network, and Disk devices obviously have different requirements and should each have their own interrupt. This insane sharing of IRQs should end.
--Mike--
http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/faqbios.html#Ho w can I disable ACPI?
I've had no problems with Win2k or Linux with this motherboard either.
;)
Using ACPI under Windows of course as well. Although after many years of lacking enough IRQ's I'm rather uneasy about IRQ sharing
This does not mean I haven't had issues with ACPI. My laptop (PIII 500 Tecra) had issues with IRQ sharing. There were audible clicks with the sound while the infra red port was polling for other infra red devices. Simply disabling the infra red port cured this issue.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
You can get a "tweaked" bios that adds the ACPI on/off feature again. I got one for my KG7-RAID to fix some quirky hardware issues. Check www.biosmods.com Then, get a floppy disk, reboot, flash, and you're all set to go.* I found a great wealth of info (even for non-abit owners) at Paul's KG7FAQ
*Flashing the BIOS can be risky for the inexperienced. Don't lose power! (how?).
It says certified for Windows XP not BSD does it not? Get a different board that is certified for your OS.
Duh? Is this a no brainer or what?
The funny thing about it is that I have a specific entry in my junkbuster to allow ads from *.slashdot.org, cuz I don't mind supporting slashdot. But I'm sure not going to start allowing doubleclick thru. Net loss in revenue, guys...
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Nuff sed
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Way to credit your source, ass.
Maybe you should have said "The _same_ info can be found here."
You must have stopped reading before the next sentence:
"When you are dealing with these hardware schemas, rebalancing becomes risky and therefore is not implemented in Windows XP except for very specific scenarios."
Here is also a little talk about a similar situation having to do specifically with the VIA KT266A chipset:
"Win2k and WinXP require PCI devices to share IRQs, and neither OS supports the rebalancing of resources. Some say that if you install Win2k with ACPI disabled, then you'll be able to steer unused IRQs to your PCI devices. This may be true for Win9x, but it is emphatically not true of Win2k in my experience. Win2k accepts whatever IRQ assignments the Dragon+ BIOS makes. So the ONLY way to eliminate IRQ sharing in Win2k is to eliminate it in the BIOS. The only low risk way to make your Geforce to sole owner of IRQ11 is to disable the onboard audio and LAN and replace them with PCI cards.
But then you'll quickly discover that you can't use PCI slots 1 and 5 because they share the IRQ assigned to your AGP Geforce. You can't use slot 2 without sharing an IRQ with the onboard Promise RAID controller. You can't use slot 4 without sharing an IRQ with the onboard USB controller. Slot 3 doesn't share an IRQ with any onboard device. But many report that slots 1-3 don't work with their PCI boards (probably a bus mastering issue)."
In short, IRQ steering is good and if you disable it, you are just asking for trouble. It's implemented for a reason. It's not "just there."
As far as you saying "we didn't want to solve a hard problem" that is bullshit because IRQ sharing does solve a big problem, that being not having enough IRQs for x amt of devices in your system. I guess you just can't seem to let go of the ISA days.
He's problably original MS employee who wrote that. Someone can't plagiarise themselves, can they?
AdSubtract
You're welcome.
This was posted by an MS guy to the OSR NTDEV listserv:
The early ACPI machines were mostly laptops. And the laptops of that generation had most of their devices either embedded in the chipset or on the ISA bus. The PCI or AGP buses were used only for video, and to connect the north bridge with the south bridge. (In Intel's chipset terms, the North bridge has all the fast gates of the chipset, including the memory controller, AGP and in that generation, the PCI bus generation logic. The south bridge contains all the slow gates, including the IDE controller, the ISA bridge, all the PC legacy stuff and probably a USB controller. Today, the south bridge probably also has audio and a few other random odds and ends.) Because the laptops of that era had all of their devices on the ISA bus, interrupt sharing worked poorly. If you bought a mid-'90s laptop from IBM or Toshiba, the serial port and possibly IR would be disabled. There would be a utility packaged with the machine that allowed you to turn on your serial or IR, but at the cost of the bi-directional parallel port, or one of the PCMCIA slots, since there just weren't enough IRQs in the machine to guarantee that all of the peripherals worked, especially if you filled both PCMCIA slots with combo cards.
I once debugged a Toshiba 750CDT in a docking station that had two PCMCIA cards plugged into the machine, two PCMCIA cards plugged into the slots in dock, two ISA cards in the dock and an extra IDE device in the dock, too. This meant that the total demand on the machine was 20 IRQs, when only 16 were actually available.
(As an aside, I've been trying to convince Intel to put APIC interrupt controllers, which would allow many more IRQs, in their laptop chipsets since 1997. My predecessor had been trying since '94. They may actually manage it soon.)
Along comes ACPI. When you turn on ACPI in a machine, it suddenly switches all the power management logic in the machine from delivering its interrupts as BIOS-visible, non-vectored System Management Interrupts over to OS-visible, vectored interrupts. And that interrupt is delivered level-triggered, active-low, which means that it can be shared with a PCI interrupt.
Now consider that these early ACPI machines were already over-committed in terms of interrupts. There was no way to make them work with PCI devices spread out on lots of IRQs. So I just made the code collapse all the sharable devices onto the ACPI interrupt, which was fixed in the chipset by Intel at IRQ 9. By doing it this way, I could hide the fact that ACPI had just created a demand for one more IRQ. (If you use a non-Intel chipset that has ACPI coming in on some other IRQ, you'll see all the PCI devices in Win2K go to that IRQ, not 9.)
Further complicating this story was that I was trying to get ACPI machines to work back in 1997, when the people working on Plug and Play in Win2K hadn't yet gotten their stuff going yet. At time, it wasn't possible to move a device from one set of resources to another after it had been started. This meant that any IRQ solution that I came up with had to work from the first try, so it had to be conservative.
The everything-on-IRQ-9 solution worked. It got the machines to run, as long as none of the device drivers mis-handled their ISRs. (Later, this turned out to be a huge debugging problem, since when you chain eight or nine devices, you'll get somebody who fails.) The solution wasn't optimal, but it did work. I meant to go back and change it later, before we shipped Windows 2000.
A couple of years passed. I had been working on multi-processor problems and on other aspects of ACPI. It got close to the time to ship Windows 2000 and somebody brought up the old question of IRQ stacking. I worked up a more-elegant solution, one that spread out interrupts on most machines. By that time, Plug and Play had been mostly completed, and that wasn't a bottleneck any more. But the test team told me that they wouldn't let me put it into the product, since they didn't have time to re-test the thousands of machines that had already been tested with the old algorithm.
At the time, I thought that this was somewhat ridiculous. I thought that my code would work just fine. I thought that their fears were un-justified. But I was overruled, and I just put the code into what became Windows XP, letting Windows 2000 ship with the simple, safe, yet frustrating stacking.
This is a good point in the story to explain that, in ACPI machines, the IRQ steering is accomplished by interpreting BIOS-supplied P-code called ASL. The IRQ routers are completely abstracted by the BIOS. The OS doesn't need to know about the actual hardware. The old IRQ steering code in Win9x, which was dropped into the non-ACPI HAL in Win2K, had to have code specific to each chipset, which meant that it didn't work when new chipsets were shipped. It was also written in a way that it assumed that there were exactly four IRQs coming from PCI. ACPI machines sometimes have many more. (This is the reason that you don't see the IRQ steering tab in ACPI machines. It just wasn't flexible enough and we didn't have time to re-do it.)
What we discovered with Windows XP was that all of those ACPI machines that had been tested with their IRQs stacked on IRQ 9 tended to fail when you spread the IRQs out. A typical example of a failure would work like this: WinXP doesn't need the IRQ for the parallel port unless you're using one of the extended modes. So the parallel driver releases its IRQ until it's needed. The IRQ choosing logic (called an IRQ "arbiter") would move a PCI device onto the parallel IRQ. This action depends on re-programming the chipset so that the parallel port isn't actually triggering the IRQ. This is supposed to happen by interpreting even more BIOS P-code that manipulates the chipset, since there is no standard for parallel port configuration.
If your chipset comes from Intel, this probably works, since the mere act of setting a PCI device to an IRQ also disconnects that IRQ from the ISA bus. But if your chipset comes from VIA or ALi, there is another step involved. The problem is that nearly all of the BIOS P-code out there is copied from old Intel example code. So they are almost all missing the extra step necessary in VIA and ALi machines.
If the BIOS fails to stop the IRQ coming from the parallel port, the machine hangs, since the parallel port, which sends its IRQs active-high, edge-triggered, will ground the interrupt signal in the passive state. And grounding an interrupt which is enabled active-low, level-triggered will cause an endless stream of interrupts. The parallel port is just an example. Pick any device that is in the legacy SuperIO chip and the story repeats itself.
In Windows XP, I made a bunch of changes. In machines without cardbus controllers, (which don't have the IRQ problems created by PCMCIA,) it will try to keep the PCI devices on the IRQs that the BIOS used during boot. If the BIOS didn't set the device up, then any IRQ may be chosen. But if your machine has a VIA chipset, or if it has a BIOS that we know to be broken, then we fall back to the Win2K-style stacking behavior. The unfortunate truth is that you guys on this list mostly build your own machines, rather than buying them from reputable manufacturers, which means that you guys own the machines with broken BIOSes and VIA chipsets. So even with WindowsXP, you'll see the same old stacking behavior.
One notable addendum is that any machine with an APIC interrupt controller, and thus more than 16 IRQs, will spread interrupts out, even in Win2K. In the past, this was mostly limited to SMP machines. But any desktop machine shipping today that gets the Windows logo has to have an APIC. (This was another reason that I hadn't gone back to re-write this code earlier. Intel had promised that all machines would have APICs by 1998. If this had materialized, then none of you would have had any complaints by now.) I'm actually currently working on software for some future NT that will let an administrator configure the
machine in any way he or she desires.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The BIOS can be 'repaired' using a bios-editing utility. I had used such a thing on my own board (Abit KT7A-Raid) for the same reason, as ACPI was causing all sorts of hell. After redesigning the Award bios' interface with this utility, I was able to get the "Disable ACPI" back and turn the phucker off for good. Box has been running great ever since, whether it was on Win98/ME/2k/XP or my old LFS linux system.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Here's the new slashdot for those of us not subscribed... loverly! It doesn't appear all the time... yet.
http://islandofdoom.com/slashad.png
(shamelessly tagged onto the top moderated post)
Bitchslapped. Neat.
Tie that into the social implications of the acceleration of technology in Western civilization and the widening digital divide segregating old, young, rich, and poor, and boom, you're Jon Katz.
Wake up. They need it (a BIOS option) for XP because MS figured out it would screw the Linux world. There is no other reason.
You really are foolish and seem to not know much about the actual logical superiority of BigEndian over your antiquated marginalized favorite LittleEndian mode.
When you keep doubling the owrd length in Little endian mode you end up making the most bizarre looking byte order, and then to add to irrational inconsistency intel-appologists number their bits in left to right order on paper contrary to their pigheaded little endian philosophy.
Of 12 major widely different cpu archtectures, only two were little endian.
And they always get upset when NuBus, and Busses in general, and network PHYS layer streams and SCSI command packets, etc etc are all in Big endian.
Dont forget file storage order, the following file types are all big endian, even on a PC: JPEG, Photoshop, SGI, Sun Raster, Word Perfect.
intel appologists and bigots are so stuck in their backward 8.3 file limit loving backward byte order mentality that they are the kind of people that hated the mouse, hated icons, hated syntaxless interfaces, hated progress or rational reason.
There are many intel leaning bigotted faqs. Some biased fools sling phrases like (Mac Fags) as the parent post does, but some are even temperred.
Here is a semi neutral long FAQ on endianness:
http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/html/endian_faq.html
12 paragraphs of gobbledy-gook TLAs, obscure commands and oddball subjects makes me glad that somebody doesn't require me to be a hardware engineer just to play Solitaire.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I miss the ISA days personally. PCI cards just aren't as scary when you throw them at somebody.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
ACPI has a lot of benefits, and the problem isn't really ACPI per se, but the poor support for ACPI in free operating systems is the real problem here. ACPI has been around for a while (my 4-year old socket 7 motherboard supported it optionally), and the PCI IRQ sharing that this person is griping about is actually part of the PCI specification and should be supported by the operating system exclusively of whether ACPI works or not. It does enough things better than before that its likely to be standard pretty soon. And if the linux (and bsd) acpi developers don't get on the ball, there could be no new notebooks at all with working power management in free operating systems within a year. This is no different than Microsoft demanding that system makers remove floppy drives and ISA slots. Which they've been doing or will do soon. Rather than whining about it would be much better for someone to write decent ACPI drivers.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
This thread on the arstechnica forums goes into details about how IRQ sharing works under Win2K and XP. Look for a post by PeterB.
Somewhat more informative than the party line.
Very interesting analysis of exactly why ACPI doesn't work with VIA chipsets... thanks. :)
This is pretty much the definitive comment on this issue, as far as I can tell, and a real pleasure to read.
Thank you.
We're on the road to Tycho.
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT has ACPI, so, unless they back it out, it'll be in 5.0 when it's released.
I think there's already experimental ACPI support in the Linux 2.4 kernel.
I can't speak for NetBSD or OpenBSD, although a search for "ACPI" on the NetBSD Web site suggests that they're at least looking at the FreeBSD effort.
So, even if this were the Evil Plot by Microsoft to destroy free UNIXes that some people have suggested (I see no evidence that it is), it's only going to work for a while.
I think that posts such as this only confirm to me the fact that evil ultimately is pointless. Although I may be tempted to browse at -1, so often I experience the futility of browsing a wide screen, and tell myself, that next time it is the straight and narrow for me. No more evil trolls, liquor or late nights. Thank you, Mr Klerck, for making slashdot a better place to go for us all, and hence the world. Please, dedicate the rest of your life to this noble task, and your childrens', if you know how to make them.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
A lot of people here seem to be dumping on Soyo boards. Perhaps there is reason, or perhaps I'm lucky, but my main workstation is a Soyo Dragon (not the pro) for the socket A chips. Now, I will say with honesty that I've had exactly one reason to reboot linux since installing this board, and that has been to upgrade kernels.
This is a far cry from what my previous board, the Asus A7V was doing for me, with hangs in Quake3 about once a day. And my uptimes never exceeded 20 days.
I've been fairly pleased with this board, and my only regret is that it lacks 4 ddr sockets. Oh, and extra Socket A would be nice, but that's another issue entirely.. =)
-fc
. echo -e \\04 >
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The same somebody who doesn't allow you to build your own system with your choice of components. Makes the comparison rather moot.
Poster states that in order to get the mobo WinXP certified they had to remove the ability to turn on/off ACPI, and that is causing problems with FreeBSD. Now, if that were the case wouldn't FreeBSD not run on *ANY* WinXP certified mobo? Because all of them would have to have this feature disabled? Furthermore, I am running FreeBSD on a new ASUS mobo that is on the WinXP HCL, and it runs just ducky, so I would think that it must be *his* mobo only that is not working properly.
The reason why MS is so adamant about the ACPI on/off issue, I suspect, is because Windows XP (and 2000 before it) generally requires a full re-install if you switch between APM and ACPI. I imagine they don't want consumers fiddling around with harmless-sounding settings in their bioses, and then finding out that their computers won't boot.
Oh, I'd have posted a link to the post, but OSR's listserv (Lyris) won't allow links to messages. I had to cut&paste.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You can play Solitaire with a deck of fucking cards.
Since you seem like an Apple nut, I'd recommend you only buy 'Industrial Design' cards, and a teak card table. You can get them both at Nieman-Marcus.
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He's clearly not one of the boys invited on the Linux Rump Ranger weekend camping trips.
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Sure, it finally gives you some reasonable I/O and power management functionality on PC hardware. But it is really an ugly kludge on top of lousy hardware. It is just stunning how many things about interrupts, I/O regions, and power management the PC architecture managed to get wrong. ACPI only "rocks" because a decade and a half of PC hardware have lowered expectations so much.
So X is Roman Numeral for ten but what number does P stand for...me so confused.
Ain't you stupid?
I can't tell if ACPI-disabled versions of XP are available but due to a memory error on my motherboard Windows 2000 blue-screened on startup. The STOP code was 0x000000A5 which indicated the ACPI BIOS extensions were busted in some fashion.
In the error write-up (linked above) it states you can re-install Win2K and bypass the installation of the ACPI Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) by pressing F7 in the install process. I waited for new RAM to come in and that fixed the problem, but it leads me to believe that motherboards with the ability to turn ACPI on and off break XP in the same fashion as Win2k, namely the HAL is 'hard coded' to use ACPI extensions when you install XP with ACPI enabled (and vice versa), and a clueless user who sets ACPI to 'NO' all of a sudden has a 'broken' copy of Win2000/XP.
So Microsoft says: "Well, writing the code to dynamically change the HAL from ACPI to Standard and vice versa at runtime is far too complicated and costly. Since it [the BSOD after changing ACPI BIOS settings] is a user issue, to combat support tickets and the like it would be a great idea if you [BIOS/motherboard manufacturers] simply remove the ability to enable/disable ACPI. Really, why would you want to do that anyway? Without ACPI we can't do neat-o power management in the OS and most users wouldn't care either way."
It makes a lot of sense to me - I'm not sure how many issues this would've caused but I can see few reasons to disable ACPI in the BIOS, and doing so breaks Windows 2000/XP anyway. To me, this is a non-issue and a good business move to reduce software and support costs.
Thanks,
--
Matt
I don't know if this could be partially related, but I've had numerous problems in both Win2k and Linux with this Soyo (Athlon) board. I know that there are some PCI latency issues with the Via KT266A chipset for one. There are some hacks floating around to re-configure some of the PCI registers. Unfortunately, this has not been a total solution in my case. My SB Live! still locks the system solid upon any access. Sometimes the Via 'Rhine' ethernet controller built into this board will also die under heavy load.
So I'm wondering: is this a massive flaw in Soyo's design or is it something that can be fixed via hacking the BIOS and/or chipset registers. Anybody with a good reply to this deserves to be modded up to 5. (-:
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Meesa back!
As I recall Alan Cox, Linus and many of the kernel hackers have contempt for the complexity of ACPI. They're very unwilling to spend much effort in implementing it.
I wonder if, given the problems that the mother board manufacturers have had in implementing it, that in fact the Microsoft ACPI implementation is very low quality as well.
Given the lack of source we'll never now....
Anyway just a possibility.
Nevada my friend.
Nevada.
One large sandy brothel.
Probably too late for an AC to be moderated up, but what the hell...
I learned how this stuff works by running into problems using VMware. If you install XP on a system with ACPI enabled, then try to run it on one with ACPI disabled (such as VMware, which supports APM but not ACPI) it won't boot. The problem is that XP (and 2000 & NT) uses a different HAL for ACPI support. Its easy enough to fix (search www.vmware.com for ACPI & HAL if you care)
I don't know about Microsoft's claims WRT XP not supporting APM, but there is at least some APM support in there, because if you install XP inside a VMware virtual machine, and tell the VM to use APM, you can get XP to power off on shutdown. Maybe some of the other APM stuff doesn't work, dunno.
The Borg speak.
now I understand while I could never get all 9 NIC cards running in Win2K when they run just fine in Linux. ( options somenetcard1 irq=10 ; alias eth0
somenetcard1)
Bravo. I'm surprised it didn't snare any SCSI bigots into a flame war though.
Now tell us why the Borg forced MB manufacturers to again expose the processor ID number (spy technology) after MB manufacturers went to the trouble of hiding the processor ID number via the BIOS when the spy feature was added to the processors a year or three ago.
Since I got the Dragon+, I haven't had any problems with Linux - in fact. the 2.4.9 kernel is quite helpful:
Local APIC disabled by BIOS -- reenabling.
Found and enabled local APIC!
(from the messages log file)
I'm running all the onboard devices - and a few bus mastering PCI cards without a hitch.
One thing you may want to look into is a utility like 'setpci' which allows you to poke the bios registers with anything you please - even if there isn't a specific BIOS entry for it. For example I'm enabling athlon xp power management with:
setpci -v -s 0:0.0 95=1E
setpci -v -s 0:0.0 92=e9
VIA's website has a lot of info.
and it's run even better for me. I get more frames in games like UT and RTCW; with a current two week uptime. I say that MS is just pushing people around again..
$1.5MM is not enough
According to CmdrTaco, Slashdot is gonna start charging $5 for 1,000 pageviews. Considering the Slashdot, the community that was sold for $1.5MM, is built on the labors of their visitors, who contribute news, comments, and moderation services for free (yes, like FC), it's gonna be hard to get those same people to pony up $5 just to use the site (FC will remain free). ah and their new system uses "PayPal". (ha)
When: 3/4/2002
Company: Slashdot
Lucked: 10
Points: 110
- If you want to stick it to the man, you could do the reverse and Block MSIE from your Site
Lessee...87% of our traffic have user agents "MSIE"... Yeah, that'll teach the man to visit us!-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Unlike the people stupid enough to vote for Democans and Republocrats, in whos piss I have to wade through every day with their taxes, and their regulations of my private life.
The trick is to notice that it doesn't matter which of the two parties is in power, they both grow the power and intrusiveness of government. They both lie about respecting your "freedom" while stabbing you in the back.
I would much rather piss away my "vote" and not give them the satisfaction of throwing it away for me.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Ever heard of WinHEC?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
your eloquent story gives me the tingles...
We sell several motherboards (mostly MSI) that have a bios option to disable "IPCA". This is acpi backwards to get around MS's requirement (for XP certification, MS doesn't say it won't work) to not have the option.
I saw my first piece of hardware the other day that wouldn't work with acpi off. it was a SMC gigabit ethernet card (natsemi chipset) on a Tyan Tiger MP (S2460). If ACPI was disabled, the link lights on the card would go out, and both XP and 2K said "no network connection." We found this problem when a customer brought back one of the NIC's because it wouldn't load the driver correctly (in win2k, different motherboard I think). I tested it on the Tyan board w/ XP pro and sure enough, if ACPI was off the driver wouldn't load. I imagine they'd disabled ACPI since they intended to use linux for the systems (part of a cluster) after they tested all the hardware. Enabling ACPI allowed the built-in XP driver to work.
You're ruining a perfectly good rant with trivial facts. :)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I'd love to, but I'm not the author of that long piece. I'm merely a participant on that listserv. Since most of the developers on that list aren't concerned with processor serial number issues, being driver developers, it wasn't discussed. Sorry.
And yes, I know, IHBT, IHL, HAND.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
> , changing ACPI from on to off or vice versa on a current install of Windows 2000 or XP will... "fuck shit up."
You can safely "downgrade", that is turn ACPI support off in Win2K by chaning your HAL without any problems.
Apple has complete control over their hardware. Microsoft, for all we hate them, should at least have a little. ACPI basically eliminates the hardware problems due to IRQs that we've been dealing with for something like ten years.
XP with ACPI runs beautifully on my Asus A7V with Athlon chip and even the dreaded Via 4 in 1 chipset.
Look at IRQ 9:
IRQ 0 System timer OK
IRQ 1 Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard OK
IRQ 6 Standard floppy disk controller OK
IRQ 8 System CMOS/real time clock OK
IRQ 9 Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System OK
IRQ 9 NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 64 OK
IRQ 9 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller OK
IRQ 9 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller OK
IRQ 9 Intel(R) PRO/100+ Management Adapter OK
IRQ 9 SB PCI(WDM) OK
IRQ 9 Promise Technology Inc. Ultra IDE Controller OK
IRQ 13 Numeric data processor OK
Now ask me how many times XP has crashed since I installed it after purchasing on day one...
(The answer is zero. Not once. The thing is more stable even than my G4 running OSX)
Give 'em a break for once. They may suck as a corporation, but XP is a decent product, and there's nothing at all wrong with them requiring ACPI "always on." It'll save most users the trouble of IRQ conflicts while still letting them plug the latest shit from CompUSA into their PC every month.
Didn't see it because I use Proxomitron. It lets you use regexps to zap ads, and /. ads are already blocked.
Life is a psychology experiment gone awry.
SCSI won't be dead until I can buy a 10 15,000rpm IDE (or USB or firewire, whatever) disks and install them in an external enclosure, or until I can get fibre-channel switches and enclosures for something under the price of a new desktop computer, each.
Seen a 64-bit, 66MHz IDE controller lately?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Each PCI bus (yes there can be many more than one) supports up to four interrupts. The way the bus is wired, these interrupt lines are equally distributed among the slots. Actually, all slots have the four lines connected, they are just staggered to the devices, so that the first interrupt line in slot 0 is not the first interrupt line again until slot 4, but each slot can actually use all four interrupts, most devices use one. The PCI bridge is then given four IRQ numbers to assign to those lines, in the case of Windows 2000 and XP its 9 for all the lines. Not a big deal, because you may be sharing already and this is the way the PCI bus is suppose to be able to work, in an ideal world.
The problems come about in the drivers and in design. When devices share interrupts, drivers need to be conservative about what they do in their ISR's (interrupt service routines) because someone else on that same interrupt might be trying to get some work done too, (like playing a wave file through your sound card and transfering data thourgh you fire wire card at the same time) both cards will be producing interrupts that need to be serviced. Its difficult to write efficient interrupt handlers for many reasons, but not impossible. People usually get lazy or the hardware is poorly designed. And that's why there are so many problems with sharing interrupts. In theory it should work, but the drivers/hardware are sometimes not up to the task.
Microsoft has said, this is how we are going to do it, its designed to work like this, make your devices work right. Although, they can be dicks when it comes to their hardware certification program (WHQL), the devices should be able to work like this. Now as far as the MoBo, my guess is that it probably did not function correctly in non-ACPI mode, and MSFT said, fine ACPI works, but if you go into non-ACPI mode, we can't certify you....
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Yeah, its risky to run windows, so lets not implement windows!
Windows is to complicated to use and develop so
lets dump it!
A few minutes of digging through my webserver log turned up about two-thirds of the hits come from IE. Whether that's lower or higher than average, I don't know. What I do know, though, is that I thought the Internet was about communication. Cutting people off because they don't meet your standard of 1337ness or whatever doesn't further that goal; instead, it makes you come across as snobbish and pretentious. If that's what you want, though, it's your website...everybody else will just buzz on by and go elsewhere.
I won't try to speak for others, but I wouldn't bother firing up Cygwin/XFree86 to bring up a website in Konqueror through an SSH link to one of my Linux servers just because some wanker thinks IE isn't good enough for him. That's a breach of netiquette on par with spawning a million browser windows to load goatse.cx.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
My DVD Decoder was sharing an IRQ and would stutter every few minutes. Sigma Designs tech support had me disable ACPI in WinXP and it worked after that, but it was kind of a pain having to isolate it's IRQ. I thought it was just a drivers glitch. You should have to disable ACPI in the BIOS though.
Maybe this Abit trick for a similar 'disable hidden' problem will work with Soyo boards?
Here's the link (12th item down):
http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/faqbios.html
Slashdot: rejecting tech news in favor of rubber band guns since 1997.
ACPI is needed to solve interrupt conflicts. More and more people stuff more hardware in their computers, eating up the interrupts available. That's why ACPI is needed, and that's why by default Windows2000 and Windows XP install the ACPI compliant HAL (hardware abstraction layer) for the kernel.
If you don't want this HAL, but want a different one (like the standard HAL), press during the dos part of the install of Windows 2000 or Windows XP 'F7' when you see the 'Press F6 if you need to install a third-party SCSI or RAID driver' remark at the bottom of the screen.
You can't switch HAL's between the ACPI and the standard HAL after you've installed windows 2000 or windows XP, because Windows enumerates the hardware differently with different HAL's. You have to do a complete re-install to switch hal's and after that you can manually set interrupts.
However, you can also prevent Windows2000/XP to see if there is an ACPI bios, by switching off powermanagement in the bios. This sometimes helps (it did for me on my ASUS TUSL2-C board, since I didn't want an ACPI HAL because I suspected my SBLive to misbehave due to the interrupt sharing).
Bottom line however is: the hardware should be fully compliant with the ACPI system. Most hardware is, some isn't but still has drivers on the market for Windows2000/XP. If the motherboard can't provide a good ACPI system, it's not worth your money, because then there is something seriously wrong with it.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Fix FreeBSD then. PCI devices can share IRQs... however, you have to take the time to write the drivers properly. I don't see what WinXP has to do with anything... I'm sure the XP drivers for your cards can share IRQs just fine.
Damm Dell bios would not support dual video cards. Not taking no for an answer, all this IRQ steering is in registry settings, AFAIK. (and with some hacking, you should be able to get what you want)
Gibberish to me, but I did work out there are security considerations, and the automatic hardware discovery mode & auto fix it.. bad idea. Amazing what happens when APM vector is corrupted, I see why support for old DVD assist cards is being killed off....
I think the Dragon-board uses Award BIOS like almost all other boards and u can hack the BIOS and re-enable the 'ACPI disable' option w/ a program called 'Modbin'...
Easy. MS shit is a monolithic mess. Linux and UNIX is basicaly modular. With proper modular design there is no problem advancing while still supporting legacy HW. If functionality in a modular component causes a conflict, that functionality is probably in the wrong modular component. In 20 years of programming I have never seen a case where this was not true. BTW, this perspective gave me quite a laugh as I read the latest MSvsDOJ depositions.
To make long story short - VIA chipsets are buggy. If you buy AMD setup, stick to AMD761 chipset. It works. Period. There *is* a reason why we finns call VIA chipset machines 'VIAllinen' (which is finnish for 'faulty') :)
If IE's Windows integration is a monopoly, then I'm all for the removal of Konqueror from KDE.
Apples and oranges. Windows is an OS, KDE is a gui. You cannot remove IE from the OS (windows), but you are quite free to remove Konqueror from the OS (linux/*BSD/etc).
Another point, FreeBSD is broken with respect to Oracle. Oracle won't even install on FreeBSD anymore. It hangs halfway through. You get the picture. Of course Oracle does not support FreeBSD at all so you are on your own anyway. FreeBSD is in a constant state of flux and can can no longer keep up with the rest of the industry, whether it's VMWare, Oracle, or APCI.
Devon.com: Your browser has identified itself as a version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Becaublablablabla
Amateurish.
0x or or snor perron?!
Well that might be the reason that WinXP randomly reboots on my machine, so i went back to win2000 - well sorry but i do have stuff that i still need win (someversion) to use (but mostly im in linux ;)
I just recently purchased a Toshiba Satellite 5005-s504 and this does not have a bios. Everything is controlled by ACPI and the OS. Works fine in M$ Windoze but, Linux has had a little bit of trouble, nothing crazy, but sound, modem, easy stuff like that, that should work doesnt. This is just an informational post to let yous guys know that this is happening.
http://mobilix.org/toshiba_s5005_s504.html
Document on installing Linux on the 5005-s504 http://www.topica.com/lists/5005-linux/?cid=2823
An email list set up to get everything working.
we finns call VIA chipset machines 'VIAllinen' (which is finnish for 'faulty') :)
/. ?
Linus ? posting on
Try again, the headline should be:
"ACPI Forced on Designed for WinXP Mobos"
There are differnt levels of MS certification for a product. Designed for is the strictest, which basically says we built it the way MS said so if it doesn't work with their software it's MS's problem.
More of stuff being blamed on MS just to bash MS. ACPI can be disabled, so what's the big deal if it's there? It's not like MS saying it has to be there and must remain enabled. They're just saying that if you want our logo on your box you must give this option, which ultimately is supposed to make configuring your computer easier.
winmodem.
If gotti had had the clout that these slimebawls have......
You know if you turn the acpi off in the bios you can then boot into windows, XP included and it worn't turn it self off, but you go into device manager and find hidden devices, you will find one disabled. Turn it on, and the computer will shut it self off.
Just my experience at work
WPA, SDMI, ACPI, IE. I guess limiting consumer choice is Microsoft's core business these days.
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
It seems that the problem per se is not with ACPI but rather with device drivers with long interrupt service times.
I imagine Windows 2000/XP has some facility for keeping track of average interrupt service times for device drivers - anyone know how to get at that data? It seems to me if we could track down offensive drivers, we could put the pressure on the right people -- the device driver developers.
For too long motherboard manufacturers have been getting away with incomplete and buggy ACPI implementations. Forcing the issue with those manufacturers who need XP certification given the market they're pitching to, can only be a good thing surely? Having to have ACPI enabled on the board means that there can be no 'just turn off ACPI' cop out from vendors when things go pear shaped.
Yes, there is. It's called a modified bios. There are plenty of site's out there that have access to modded bios's for various boards (Abit, Asus, SOYO, etc). Find one that allow's you to toggle the ACPI ON/OFF flag, or mod one yourself. Good places to start for AMD based stuff are:
Paul's Unofficial Faq's for:
KA7 (VIA KX133 [Slot A]) -> http://www.viahardware.com/faq/ka7/ka7faq.htm
KT
KG
For Intel, I mod my own bios.
XP does not. Read above. I've got one Soyo Dragon Plus running
OpenBSD without ACPI thanks to a modded bios, 1 Abit KG7 running Win2K without ACPI thanks to a modded BIOS, and a couple of AOpen i815 board's running without ACPI, One XP, one FreeBSD, thank's to MODDED bios's.
Do your damn homework.
Sometimes people just have to learn and adapt to change, it is one of the requirements of being a living thing.
Slashdot has too many people voting Democrat as it is. You don't like the SSSCA? The guy pushing it is a Democrat. The main opposition to the SSSCA is Republican. This was just on newsforge a little bit ago, it read "House Republicans Cool to SSSCA".
Fortunatly, the Republicans control the house, so the SSSCA will never be voted on in the perverted senate.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
it may be one of the ways xp tracks to see if the system has had more thant three changes. In which case if you change more than 3 irqs you will disable the os.
The answer is 42, Now what's the question?
Has anyone out there, ever, on a board-level system, or something you get from Dell or Compaq, even seen a desktop system that hibernates (the S3 level?)? I believe the hibernate mode along with all the other capabilities of ACPI are all vaporware. Theoretically, a hibernating machine should use less watts than even a telephone answering machine, and I would like to have answering and FAX capability on the promised 2 watts -- I am one of these power conservation fanatics. The best I can do is S2-standby, and even that has bugs -- can't use a serial mouse with it, and can't print after coming out of standby without rebooting.
Simple solution......
FRICKING bring the damned intel processors into the 21's century with 32 interrupts.
Damn, we haven had an interrupt increase cince the 386 processor, screw software compatability... gimmie a P-V processor with 32 interrupts, a mobo that is happy with it and I'll be back running on my linux box within a week. (windows people will have to wait a year or so, but hey... that's an advantage right?)
Also, there's alot of cards out there that don't need interrupts... (serial is one of them... processor speeds have increased to the point that parallel and serial ports should be interrupt-less.) granted, removing all legacy ports anf using only the usb bus for all external toy-prephrials is a good way (1 irq for 30-odd items) I dont see sound outside of professional uses needing an irq either... (come on... hearing your dings, blats, and fragging doesn't have to have 10ms latency..) and then you have the horribly designed IDE bus... what moron made it only support 2 drives???? get it to support 4 and DELETE one damned controller and IRQ hog... (Me? I uses SCSI... 15 devices on 1 irq... and better overall performance..)
Overall the PC design is a nightmare-mess. and until intel get their heads out of their butts and start cleaning it up... it will stay a mess..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In the eighties, when Microsoft was facing competition from Lotus--remember? there was once competition?--it has been reported that when new releases of DOS were in the works, the slogan was "The job's not done 'til Lotus won't run."
Now, Microsoft all but controls the hardware platform as well as the OS.
Gee, the changes mandated by Microsoft just happen to disable Linux? Gosh! Fancy that!
No, I don't think that Microsoft did it deliberately (starry-eyed idealist that I am). But I do think that Microsoft realizes that constantly changing, constantly tinkering with hardware interfaces in ways that are always compatible with Microsoft, but frequently cause problems for companies that are not dictating the changes, is good for Microsoft.
Don't you love it? They can get a special key with a picture of the Windows logo put onto every keyboard, but they can't manage to make the "Prnt Scrn" key changed to "Clip Scrn?" (Or, how about... change Windows so it will actually PRNT the scrn?)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
All you need to do is reflash the motherboard.
I bet there's a replacement BIOS.
I don't get it
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If you installed XP with ACPI enabled you will have to reload the OS completely with ACPI turned off if you want to be able to change interrupts.
(I had NIC, Video, Mouse, and USB on IRQ9)
It is Very VERY annoying. Same deal with Windows 2000, which is what I have had the problem with. You cant just change out the HAL like you could in NT4.
"I am a warrior, and information is my weapon..."
"ACPI Disabled in WinXP-Certified Motherboards"
Cliff old buddy, I believe you meant APM disabled, as ACPI is required. Do you have 'phrase-wise dislexia' or something?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
But FORCING ACPI ON MAKES NO SENSE!!!
How does that help any more than having it default to being on, and then letting the user make changes if they like? If the user doesn't know what they're doing, they're not going to disable ACPI!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
ACPI is a very complicated standard. It's very possible that both Microsoft and Soyo have compliant implementations that simply don't work together. That type of thing happens much more often than people appear to realize. For Microsoft to certify that hardware works with XP, that hardware must go through a test suite. It looks like the ACPI implementation caused their board to fail these tests. Soyo's solution appears to have been to disable ACPI. There are other Motherboards out there with ACPI enabled that are XP certified. This isn't an issue with XP and ACPI in general, just with this board.
If the test failed because Microsoft didn't implement ACPI correctly, then Microsoft should fix the problem. If Soyo didn't implement it correctly, Soyo should fix the problem. If they both implemented it according to the spec, but there's still an incompatibility, then Microsoft shouldn't certify the board unless Soho makes it work with Microsoft's implementation.
Hardware incompatibilities are nothing new. I get to work with them on a regular basis. They often require vendors to work together to resolve an issue.
As it is now, the best solution is for FreeBSD to be fixed to be able to share interrupts. There's no reason PCI interrupts shouldn't be able to be shared.
People need to ease up on the everything is Microsoft's fault attitude. The link in the story to Microsoft's winlogo site even talks about ACPI support, so it's obvious that MS doesn't require this to be disabled on all motherboards. This is an issue with a single motherboard, and that vendors method of attaining their works with XP logo.
I had to disable MP 1.4 in my ASUS CUV model motherboard to ket the kernel to boot into SMP mode. This caused me to have similar IRQ problems which caused my internal on-board intel NIC not to work.
You can probably bypass the problem by passing the noapic flag to the kernel from grub or lilo. Keep in mind that this will make your PC environmentally unfriendly (they will have to deplete an extra atom or two to power your pc).
IMO Microsoft knows that linux is having problems with APIC and is making as much trouble as possible for the community by requiring MB manufac. to force this feature to be enabled. This means that when your average joe installs Linux or BSD and something doesn't work right the average joe blames the OS.
Really though, that problem deserves some serious attention.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
As there is nothing on the MS linked site that supports that claim.
Agreed; I didn't see anything in the article that would imply that either.
So that means that either MS is posting one thing and telling hardware manufacturers something completely different, or (far more likely) Soyo just doesn't understand the requirements or is too lazy to implement them properly.
(voiceover, Tom Selleck) "Can you imagine... a Beowulf cluster of %s...
(voiceover, Tom Selleck, enraged) SHOVED  UP  YOUR  ASS????!!!"
On the political spectrum, the Green Party is about as far away from Libertarianism (and Republicanism) as two parties can get.
What do you get when you cross the Libertarian Party with the Green Party?
A quick Google search turns up the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party.
Godwin's Law, offtopic discussion ended. Let's get back to talking about ACPI.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is one of the reasons why I am reluctant to buy AMD processors, although I have not heard if people experience similar problems with boards built upon the AMD 761 chipset, etc.
I have an Asus board with an AMD 761 North Bridge, and a VIA South Bridge (for ATA-100). It works *flawlessly*.
VIA has always had issues, especially in their early years.
You should have seen the looks on all those vendors' faces @ the computer show when I kept specifically asking for the AMD 761 chipset boards. Get it for the same reason you buy an Intel chipset for an Intel processor: keeps your monitor from turning blue!
I'm a 2000 man.
1) Microsoft "encourages" motherboard vendors to support the open ACPI standard and disable toggling if on/off in bios.
2) A few months later Linux and BSD kernels fully implement ACPI even better than Windows.
And this seemed like big news? Remember the old days when you would disable plug & play in bios for Linux or BSD. Then we added tools like pnpdump and isapnp, and nobody disables plug & play anymore, because Linux and BSD support it. Same thing here, a weakness will become a strength. ACPI is already coming along nicely. Be patient and let the Free/Open Source Software model prove itself, M$ can implement ACPI, but because we're not driven by marketing deadlines, we WILL IMPLEMENT IT BETTER. And you can take that to the bank.
"As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
The more "advanced" PC's get, the more stupid and insanely complicated they get.
So, who here really thinks that it's EASIER to setup and use a motherboard with the current crop of plug-n-play, vs. using your brain for a few minutes and setting jumpers? At the very least, with jumpers I never had conflicts... with a not-too-old Asus A7V board, I could never get everything working right, because the built-in controllers all shared IRQ's with PCI slots, and could not be changed.
I don't know how the mac deals with it (I used to have an Amiga, so I can only hope), but I'm going to find out if more hardware starts becoming broken for anything but WinXP.
It's possible to install/reinstall Win2k/XP with whatever HAL you wish. That way, if your computer does not allow you to enable/disable ACPI in the BIOS you can still choose Standard APM PNP or ACPI at install time. In order to choose your HAL boot off the install CD. When it says "Press F6 to install additional devices" press F5 (yes I said F5, F5 allows you to choose the HAL, press F5 and F6 if you also have a SCSI device you need installed). You have a choice between a number of different HALs, most likely you'll wanted either ACPI or Standard PC.
Jay Lee
As a former MS employee (contract) in WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) I know a lot about what is required to get a logo.
First off.. nobody is required to get a Windows Logo.
However it is a good marketing tool. It's nice for your customer to see the neato little sticker on your product. It is only a sticker.
ACPI is hard to get right.
I have seen hundreds of boards get sent back to the manufacturer because they failed a wake from S3. Or a timed wake from S3. Or because they weren't throttling the processor properly. Or a thousand other things that can go wrong with ACPI.
Apparently Soyo is sucking at getting it right.
If Soyo's implementation of ACPI is flawed it would be perfectly reasonable for them to either turn it off 100% of the time... or turn it on %100% of the time (although off is way more likely)
If they don't have ACPI enabled... it can't be wrong can it?
That's the general principle. If you can't get it right... don't include it, you'll only shoot yourself in the foot.
For those of you interested, you can purchase the WHQL driver qualification CD on the Microsoft website. It's nifty. Also I made it.
Remember the main idea here is that the primary cause of blue screens isn't the windows kernel. It's bad drivers. The real reason behind the windows logo program is to attempt to force people to have decent drivers. So if you want your Windows Logo... your drivers had better not suck.
Name ommitted for obvious NDA related reasons... although all of the info above is common knowledge... and prolly posted on Microsoft's web site.
they were a hybrid endianess where the native word was big endian but the words in a long-word were swapped.
Does this mean the designers "did it all for the NUXI?" (Apologies to Limp Bizkit.) (Read More about endianness)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now MS is dictating how to design the hardware.
ac
Get the modbin6 util from http://www.biosmods.com, I used version 1.00.38. Get the latest version of the bios for your board. Run modbin6 on the bios file and go to Edit Setup screen. Scroll down to where the ACPI menu is blacked out, hit enter, select "Normal". Save the new bios and flash it to your board.
When you reboot, go into the bios and change your ACPI settings. Note, if you have windows installed already, this might hose your install since windows likes to remember what IRQ things are using.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Solution: Don't use Windows XP
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
MS, no doubt, has noticed that the Open Source ACPI driver isn't finished.
Yeah, and a flying saucer just landed in my back yard.
The specification that dictates that users cannot disable ACPI support in BIOS is PC2001, the PC Design Guide specification. Their website (http://www.pcdesignguide.org/) appears to be down right now. Dell has a pretty informative whitepaper on the subject.
0 1- pc2001.htm
... FreeBSD doesn't have ACPI support and Linux has poor ACPI support. The IRQ sharing problem should be handled by the OS. Changing IRQs in the BIOS is a workaround for bardhardware or bad software. FreeBSD will just ignore the ACPI configuration information and use traditional methods to configure the hardware.
http://www.dell.com/us/en/gen/topics/vectors_20
PC2001 is an industry specification. It's been around for a while and was open to review by a number of large computer companies. ACPI is an open spec (confusing as hell, but open) which has been around for four years now.
The motherboards manufacturers have to conform to PC2001 if they want the "made for Windows" sticker.
Here's the real issue
IRQ sharing is very common in today's hardware and should be supported by the OS. If the hardware owner sees one piece of software work and another fail, they will blame the bad software.
You cannot change between Standard and ACPI HALs because of the different way an ACPI and a non-ACPI BIOS enumerate hardware. The copy of the hardware tree, which is kept in the registry, is stored differently for each type of HAL. If you change the HAL without running Setup again, Windows may not be able to find hardware components needed to start the computer.
For more information, see the following documents in TechNet or at support.microsoft.com:
-Pat
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I have a GeForce 3, and it is supposed to get its own interupt. How am I supposed to do that if I can't over ride ACPI ?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How do I know? I'm currently running XP on an older ABIT BH6 motherboard with APM and ACPI disabled. XP runs just fine, and even co-exists peacefully with my install of Linux.
However, if you installed XP with ACPI enabled, you cannot turn ACPI off and expect XP to run. It won't. Bad things will happen. In the same vein, you cannot enabled ACPI on an XP machine that was installed with it disabled.
Is ACPI worth anything? Well, for me at least, the jury's still out. The idea behind ACPI is nice, but so far the implementation has always seemed very slipshod.
On a side-note, I recently installed FreeBSD 4.0 on a newer Dell that has ACPI permanently enabled, and I didn't have any problems. Does FreeBSD support ACPI, or did I just get lucky?
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
maybe the fix is to purchase a Macintosh instead... I hear the iWork much better... cheers~ Gumbus
Boy... I see there are a lot of Microsoft pundits in here... I wonder why that is???!!!
If you people don't think that Mr. Balmer and Mr. Gates aren't giving the bird to our beloved Atty. Genl., and sayin' "catch me if you can asswipe"..., you really apparently live in a very protective world...
Microsoft has a lot of clout with other companies that feed off of it... ie; Motherboard manufacturers... Why do you think that Linux still has such a poor volley with the corporate sector in the workstation camps??? For that matter, in the server camps??!!!
Get thinkin' and watch whats so darned obvious!!!
(Yes, I know...)
Hello?? Fred?! Is this you?
So...FASTER processors mean that I should waste time POLLING my serial and parallel ports instead of using more efficient asynchronous interrupts? The faster the processor gets, the more time I will waste polling.
You have a lot to learn about hardware.
Oh, by the way, "a lot" is two words, "don't" has an apostrophe, and "and" is not spelled with an 'f'.
And what the hell is a "prephrial"?
You r0x0rz U l33t haX0r!
Oh yeah and as a past NuBus card (and more recent PCI chip) designer I am NOT living in the ISA days (never designed one, never will) Apple gave each NuBus card it's own geographiclly address interrupt line - a smart idea - the current PC PCI/AGP card addressing issues are direct legacy of hardware decisions made 1` years ago
It was my understanding that the Soyo Dragon Plus came with audio on board. And not just lame audio, but full SB Live compatible, optical-in's and out's, midi patch-tables et. al. audio. I have read about the instability with SB Live! cards on VIA chipsets, and wonder if using the built-in sound might fix these problems (and save yourself a slot).
"Remember the Golden Rule. The antitrust case against Microsoft is dead."
No. It is to you according to your ability to believe. The politicians, courts, corps, and mediaclowns, can all spout their versions of reality, but what you choose to believe about it is where you can and will make an impact in reality. If you choose to believe the battle is lost, then your opinion that it is lost will be formed, you will spread that opinion to those around you, and it will become a reality. It will be to you according to your ability to believe.
Change what you believe, and you will change your reality. If you do not believe you have this power, then you will indeed not have it. Thats the way life works.
So how is this that much different from Cygwin?
The only thing lame is the lameness filter itself.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
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It can be pretty handy to resolve irq conflicts, and you tell tell your OS what irqs to give to each piece of hardware. Yes, some pieces of hardware don't handle sharing very well, but if your hardware is that old, it's time to upgrade anyways.
And if your OS doesn't support ACPI, then either fix the OS, or use something else.
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FRICKING bring the damned intel processors into the 21's century with 32 interrupts.
Did you even read the guy's comments about IO-APIC? Thats 256 or whatever IRQs. Most P4 boards (finally) should support it.
Fine. So Micro$oft is jerking the hardware makers around. I'm sure this really surprises everybody.
The obvious solution is to use a non-Intel motherboard. Unfortunately, a bit of Googling turned up, basically, nothing.
IBM supposedly had a "reference design" for a PowerPC mobo, but the only implementation I saw for sale was about US$3500 (yikes!). Only 3 PCI slots and no USB.
The reason people use Wintel mobos is that they're cheap and powerful. You can get a pretty nice Intel mobo for US$500 (including processor). What can you get for that in a PowerPC/MIPS/SPARC/HPPA mobo?
Yo! Hardware guys! Market niche here!
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Even with ACPI enabled in BIOS, FreeBSD doesn't care, it'll assign whatever IRQ's it wants to assign... Just because ACPI is on the motherboard doesn't mean the OS has to use it.
Why in the world does XP need this feature disabled,
Why in the world does FreeBSD still barf on shared IRQs?
If it runs Award or AMI bios, you might be able to add it, You can find on the net, a program to edit the bios *.bin file, then flash it to RAM. You can enable or disable menu items from showing up, I used this on my mainboard to make the "daylight savings time" coreection show up, since removed because windoze does itm but if u don't u windoze, u'd be outa luck. The program is called modbin.exe, or modbin**.exe I believe. Might be worth a try,
Reece,
Shouldn't Software rely on Hardware, not the other way around?
Actually, MS is moving towards adding more text-based and command-line tools. See the overview of dotnet server where it lists a bunch of additional command line administration tools (page 4 talks about command-line admin for IIS 6.0). See also the recovery console in XP...
1) I have bought several motherboards over the last few years, and none of them had an option to disable ACPI. This is not surprising, since this has been a WHCL requirement for some time now.
2) As mentioned previously, Win2K installs a different HAL on an ACPI-enabled machine, and allowing the user to disable ACPI would create support headaches.
3) ACPI support is not incompatible with allowing the user to set the IRQs that will be used for BIOS-configured devices. In BIOSes I have seen, it is still possible to ask the BIOS to configure all devices (not just the boot devices) on an ACPI-enabled platform. Of course, an ACPI-enabled OS, like any PnP OS, will reconfigure the devices to its liking once it has booted. The original poster's problem is not that his machine has ACPI support, but that his BIOS is configuring his devices badly, and perhaps not offering the manual options to force it to do better. This represents poor legacy support, not the presence of ACPI.
3) The fact that a machine *supports* ACPI does not mean an OS must use it. In fact, all of the ACPI mobos I've seen support APM as well (though it wouldn't surprise me if this support is being dropped in newer ones.) It is not necessary to disable ACPI for an OS that is not ACPI-aware to use the APM services, just as an OS can be unaware of power management entirely and still function in legacy mode.
4) It is possible to force Win2K to install using an APM or "Standard PC" HAL, in which case it will respect the resource assignments made by the BIOS (like NT4). As I understand it, the whole phenomenon of putting everything on IRQ9 is a design choice made in the implementation of Win2K, and is not a requirement of ACPI. Later versions of Windows use a bogus device configuration policy when the installer recognizes an ACPI-capable platform. Disabling that capability, when provided for, is a workaround for this.
5) Alternative operating systems are often lacking in their support for PnP in general, relying on the BIOS to perform resource assignments. The OS then simply probes the device to see how it was configured, but does not change the allocations. This is the minimal level of support needed to use PnP hardware.
6) It is possible to build a "legacy-free" PC that *depends* on a ACPI-capable OS and removes BIOS support for non-PnP OD, legacy PnP, APM, PC-AT, etc. This is not (yet) a WHCL requirement, but as DOS is dead and Win98 nearly so, it will happen eventually. As the mainstream moves to a "legacy-free" design, alternative OSs will have to "get with the program" and assume full responsbility for device configuration.
Iiieeww, no! Take it back! You don't play right.
I don't see how you can generalise from a KT266 chipset / some BIOS to all boards out there. In my case, the BIOS did a much better job of IRQ assignment with ACPI off than W2K did with it on.
IRQ sharing was a real problem with my streaming USB device and sound card - this cured it. Not surprisingly, I found the fix on a semi-pro audio tools site.
No, if you read it, it's the BIOS for the VIA chipsets that's buggy.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
What stellar insight, too bad you missed the entire point: Microsoft has forced a hardware vendor to eliminate user control in it's bios in a way that harms other OS. The merits of the "technnology", the size of the company forced and the merrits of Soyo in general are irrelevant. The same "standard" will be forced on all mobo makers, as the XP page linked to shows. If you repeat this patern, ALL COMODITY HARDWARE WILL BECOME M$ ONLY, STUPID. Now to address the points you and other microsoft troll appologists are shouting so fiercly.
ACIPI is a MicroShit "standard". Regardless of how open they pretend it is, they control it and can change it at will. If they don't tell anyone else how they are going to change it and force NDA on mobo makers, no one else's software is going to work. Duh. If it's as well published as other microshit standards like RTF, no one else will be able to make it work at all. Bang, free software becomes usable only on second best equipment. From what I read here ACIPI sucks anyway. If it was so great you would think motherboard makers would move towards it on their own.
I happen to like Soyo motherboards. I've owned four and all worked well, and had very configurable bios. Everyone of them has gotten good reviews and been price competitive. There have been certian additions, like a virus checker that detects lilo and halts, that have sucked but I could always turn them off. If they are popular with me, I imagine they are popular with many people who build their own systems. It's really shitty of M$ to foce changes on them that would make thier boards under other OS. I've noticed some latency problems with my Soyo Dragon, and I'll bet this is it. No, I'm not going to blame them for caving in to an extortionist I'm going to blame the extortionist.
Thanks MicroShit. Breaking other people's work is the only way you have to make your garbage competitive. What a pattern. Break software that runs on your OS, now break software that runs anywhere.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Isn't this the same board that one the linuxhardware.org award in 2001 System of the Year?
So what if mobo makers all cave to this sort of thing? This creates a whole new catagory of hardware that sucks, like winmodems. Microsoft only, dispose of in two years. It makes it just that much harder to put any other OS on a computer other than the current version of Windoze. Even if they only get a fraction of board makers to cave on some of their boards, the world will be a mine field in a year or two.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Yes, you got him. Linus Torvalds, the sole resident of the entire country of finland, is posting on /.
I see the clue-level hasn't changed much due to subscription...
--Danafter reading most of the posts here (most of the ones i can actually see on this one page in any case), it seems i've had exactly the opposite experience with this problem.
:)
i've had ACPI turned off since i bought this mb (and APM as well, don't turn my machine off until i'm damn good and ready), and it worked fine with Win98/2000AS and Mandrake and Sorcerer for weeks. then Win98 started crashing. then Win2K followed suit. both linuxes were fine. i checked the mb website (ecsusa.com - it's a K7S5A) and saw that many people were having similar problems. i flashed the BIOS. i got the latest drivers for everything. moved my RAM around. got the latest DirectX. still no improvement. then i saw this thread. i went into my BIOS and re-enabled ACPI (but not APM - i HATE it when it turns itself off).
i didn't have to reinstall Win98 or 2000AS. they work fine now. Mandrake and Sorcerer still work fine. my 3DMark2001 score improved by about 10% (wtf?). winamp doesn't crash my system anymore
Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
I'm far from sure about this, but is it possiblr that with ACPI enabled, and considering MS's restrictive licensing for XP....
Well is it possible that they can remotely power off your PC and keep it off? Then you would not be able to acess your HD and evidence of piracy would be preserved...right? All that remote access stuff is considerably easier with ACPI running...wake on lan and such.
Maybe they are just trying to ensure a minimum level of functionality and simply have not supported anythign below certain specs.
Maybe I'm just paranoid...
Maybe.
After disabling ACPI and running as Standard PC I finally got some really annoying bugs fixed that cause me many sleepless nights.
1 - DVD accelaration from my ATI Radeon works without problems now
2 - 3D Framerate/sec increased consdierably so everything seems smooth like in my Win2K days
Having thoese problems fixed makes me like XP a lot.
You were writing about intending to build a system and you only talked like you would install one HD. Unless you are planning on running SCSI, I would rethink that idea. Personally, and from the research I have done (plus real world experience), I would install at least a second HD for your swap files. It needs to be at least as fast as the boot/application hard drive, and preferably, the disk does not need to be used for anything else. The second condition is to put it primary on the secondary IDE. Again, DO NOT USE IT FOR ANYTHING ELSE. And if you use the cdrw on the same IDE channel as the Primary HD, then your system will run incredibly fast compared to others. The trick is to set up both OS's to SWAP each on a separate partition on the secondary HD.
Okay, well, I have been quite redundant without saying much. And so I don't have to fight the lameness filter, I am not going to post an ASCII diagram of the system setup, however, if you email me, subject Initial System Setup Design (or something similar so I won't think it's spam), I would be glad to help you in any way that I can. (Part of the OSS/Linux Ethos is to share your knowledge with others, ya?)
All right man, good luck to ya'.
--drach out
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