Re: [PATCH] x86 ACPI: Blacklist two HP machines with buggy BIOSes (Re: 2.6.27-rc8+ - first impressions)

From: Rafael J. Wysocki
Date: Mon Oct 06 2008 - 13:13:19 EST


On Monday, 6 of October 2008, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> * Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 6 Oct 2008, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > >
> > > Unfortunately some of the recent IO-APIC changes made the bug show
> > > up. To prevent this from happening, blacklist machines that are
> > > known to be affected (nx6115 and 6715b in this particular case).
> >
> > Can you point to exactly _which_ recent change made it show up? I'd
> > really like to know. _What_ was it that made us suddenly need this
> > quirk when it wasn't necessary before? I'd like to understand the root
> > cause here.
> >
> > And how did you even start looking at that strange ACPI override?
>
> i think it was caused by this stream of IO-APIC changes:
>
> 49a66a0: x86: I/O APIC: Always report how the timer has been set up
> 17c4469: x86: I/O APIC: Include <asm/i8259.h> required by some code
> 593f4a7: x86: APIC: remove apic_write_around(); use alternatives
> ce8b06b: x86: I/O APIC: remove an IRQ2-mask hack
> af17478: x86: I/O APIC: Never configure IRQ2
> c88ac1d: x86: L-APIC: Always fully configure IRQ0
> 1baea6e: x86: L-APIC: Set IRQ0 as edge-triggered
>
> Rafael/Maciej, which of these is causing it? ce8b06b ("x86: I/O APIC:
> remove an IRQ2-mask hack")?

As I wrote to Linus, on my machine it was

commit 691874fa96d6349a8b60f8ea9c2bae52ece79941
Author: Maciej W. Rozycki <macro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue May 27 21:19:51 2008 +0100

x86: I/O APIC: timer through 8259A second-chance

> Current theory is that this specific flavor of BIOS on HP / AMD / Turion
> laptops (no other type is known to be affected at the moment) somehow
> detects the IO-APIC masking patterns and uses an SMI quirk to change the
> ACPI thermal trip point to very low settings, and thus confusing cpufreq
> to (correctly) go into a very slow frequency.
>
> Activating the quirk works this around. Should we perhaps default to
> this 'quirk' enabled by default?

Well, I don't know.

Thanks,
Rafael
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