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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
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 :) :) :)
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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."
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.
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
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)
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.
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?
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...
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.
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 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
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?
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?
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.
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
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 ??
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.
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
Actually, the CURRENT (5.0) branch of FreeBSD supports ACPI just fine. They aren't back-porting it to STABLE (4.x) because there have been too many other changes to the kernel that make it a major effort.
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.
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)
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.
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'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--
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?).
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.
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 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.
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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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.
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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.
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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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
I don't get it
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
"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.
Yes, I have, I think it was on a FIC AZ-11, I could be confused though. It took about 5-7 BIOS revisions and the board pre-dated Windows XP but I managed got Hibernate to work at least once. There is a problem though. Answering and fax capability aren't a part of hibernate. The point of hibernate is that if your laptop has about 5 minutes worth of juice left it can write the RAM to HD and turn the whole computer off without loosing anything you were working on.
If you want to read more about hibernate Microsoft has a nicely written page in plain english.
There is one really nice reason to get hibernate to work on a desktop though. If you've connected an UPS to the system and the UPS can send battery level data to the system you can hibernate the system if the battery runs low.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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
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
if you had bothered to go to the link, you would have read where it is required to be always on.
thats the problem, really. I should hav the option of wheather or not I want to use it since I don't use XP or 2000.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it is not controlled by MS.
care to gues which company had the most input to this "open spec"?
what happen only XP certified mother boards are available that support current chip sets? oh wait, that time is already here. I can not turn off ACPI.I want to because my Geforce say it runs best with its own interupt, but I can't do that bacause of MS's control of the industry.Mobo manufacture MUST meet MS's requirements or they'll never sell to an OEM, and if they can't sell to an OEM, they go out of business.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As other posters have pointed out, other WinXP certified boards have full support for disabling ACPI.
they can not be or they are violating there Ms agreement.
In theory, ACPI is a good thing, but I'm leary of any open-specwhen any large company has a breat controll over. In this case MS has had most of they say on what goes into this spec.
I have a need to turn off ACPI, but I can not do that. That is the problem.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!
How is that in any way a solution? This doesn't even have anything to do with XP as has been pointed out by others. It's the PC2001 spec. The SOLUTION is to write proper drivers and kernels to handle modern motherboard SPECs. You guys are constantly harping on MS not following specs and here is an example of O.S. OSs not following specs and your blaiming MS for it! Unreal.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
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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$500 (including processor). What can you get for that in a PowerPC/MIPS/SPARC/HPPA mobo?
Yo! Hardware guys! Market niche here!
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Why in the world does XP need this feature disabled,
Why in the world does FreeBSD still barf on shared IRQs?
I beleive in fairies! I can fly!
Pardon me while I go up to the roof with a parasol.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
I don't see how you can generalise from a KT266 chipset / some BIOS to all boards out there. In my case, the BIOS did a much better job of IRQ assignment with ACPI off than W2K did with it on.
IRQ sharing was a real problem with my streaming USB device and sound card - this cured it. Not surprisingly, I found the fix on a semi-pro audio tools site.
No, if you read it, it's the BIOS for the VIA chipsets that's buggy.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
What stellar insight, too bad you missed the entire point: Microsoft has forced a hardware vendor to eliminate user control in it's bios in a way that harms other OS. The merits of the "technnology", the size of the company forced and the merrits of Soyo in general are irrelevant. The same "standard" will be forced on all mobo makers, as the XP page linked to shows. If you repeat this patern, ALL COMODITY HARDWARE WILL BECOME M$ 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.
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.