Re: 2.6.20.4: NETDEV WATCHDOG and lockups

From: Christian Kujau
Date: Tue Apr 03 2007 - 11:27:00 EST


On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Robert Hancock wrote:
These days I think it's usually best to have ACPI on with current systems.

Whooha, really? While I honor the acpi-folks' work when using a desktop machine I am otherwise always reminded to the comment in arch/i386/kernel/apm.c, which basically says: "write bios code, does it compile? does it boot win98? ->ship it" ;))

Although it's not as bad with servers, many machines are designed to run only Windows (which normally always uses ACPI) and simply aren't tested well or at all with ACPI disabled so you can run into a lot of problems which are just bugs in the BIOS, etc.

I only thought it was the other way around: less (active, used) code - less bug (caused by strange ACPI implementations). But I can see your point.

Also, on the server side, if ACPI is disabled you can't take advantage of CPU clock frequency scaling to save power.

I'm happy to do this with the new cpufreq interface, but right now I could not care less about saving power :(

Christian.
--
BOFH excuse #305:

IRQ-problems with the Un-Interruptible-Power-Supply
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/