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DISCUSSION Harry Sileoni 4 participants 5 messages Jan 10, 2003

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#0 lore raw

Hi!

While fighting for some time with my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop and a new kernel. No matter what I did in the APM-settings, the computer just freezed after some minutes of uptime. Now I noticed a page witch informed me that APIC support should not be used. I disabled APIC support from the kernel config, and now it works perfect.

So, I suggest you add a line "This option might make your system hang randomly" to the APIC support help page, so that other innocent people with the same problem don't have to do hours of fighting with the APM, which really wasn't the problem as I first though. :)

Thanks for a great kernel, and keep up the good work! :)

#1 lore raw
Quoted 10 lines · Harry Sileoni

While fighting for some time with my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop and a new kernel. No matter what I did in the APM-settings, the computer just freezed after some minutes of uptime. Now I noticed a page witch informed me that APIC support should not be used. I disabled APIC support from the kernel config, and now it works perfect.

So, I suggest you add a line "This option might make your system hang randomly" to the APIC support help page, so that other innocent people with the same problem don't have to do hours of fighting with the APM, which really wasn't the problem as I first though. :)

1. All recent 2.5/2.4 kernels have a blacklist rule that is supposed to prevent the kernel from enabling the local APIC. That kernel version are you using? What .config? Doesn't the kernel boot log contain something like "Dell Inspiron with broken BIOS detected. Refusing to enable the local APIC"?
2. There is no "APIC support help page" that I know of.

Are you sure you didn't mean ACPI instead? APIC != ACPI but people keep confusing the two.

#2 lore raw
Quoted 5 lines · Mikael Pettersson
Quoted 1 line · Harry Sileoni

While fighting for some time with my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop and a new

Are you sure you didn't mean ACPI instead? APIC != ACPI but people keep confusing the two.

The Dell Latitude C840 (what I have) and the (AFAIK) Inspiron 8100 both use the NVidia geForce4 Go graphics chipset, and apparently the posted patches to make nvidia's closed-source drivers work under 2.5 have issues with ACPI on some platforms. Digging back, I only found like one message on the LKML archives that mentioned the nvidia drivers don't play nice with ACPI.

Harry - does that match up with what you have?

Signature · 3 lines
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech
#3 lore raw
Quoted 6 lines · [email protected] said:

The Dell Latitude C840 (what I have) and the (AFAIK) Inspiron 8100 both use the NVidia geForce4 Go graphics chipset, and apparently the posted patches to make nvidia's closed-source drivers work under 2.5 have issues with ACPI on some platforms. Digging back, I only found like one message on the LKML archives that mentioned the nvidia drivers don't play nice with ACPI.

Note that you can buy replacement non-nVidia graphics cards for the I8x00 as spare parts fairly cheaply, and they're very easy to install.

--
dwmw2

#4 lore raw
Quoted 2 lines · David Woodhouse

Note that you can buy replacement non-nVidia graphics cards for the I8x00 as spare parts fairly cheaply, and they're very easy to install.

It's easier to get my employer to pay for my time to fix software issues with the laptop they paid for than it is to get them to shell out money for what they'd consider a hardware workaround. And even at "fairly cheaply", I'm not going to buy it out of my own pocket. It's a hell of a lot easier to simply skip ACPI till somebody (perhaps I) figure out how to fix it... ;)