ACPI = teh pants

regi

I've just been wrestling with a stupid soundcard problem for the last two days, and once again, the problem has been ACPI.

ACPI = the muck encrusted filth-pants of a wino on o'connell st

Spunj

Hehe, tEh pants.

Heres a quick tip when installing 2k/xp to switch it off.
When you are at the start of setup where it says
'Press F6 now to install 3rd party/RAID drivers...' press F7 (yeah F7).
Windows will now not install any ACPI support. I've had some probs with setup crashing unless I do this

Also I think you can remove it from w2k (I know for sure you can't go from Non ACPI to ACPI like this). In device manager right click on the top node for the PC (something like ACPI Compliant PC) and choose properties/Update driver. Show all hardware, choose 'Standard PC'. Should remove ACPI. Has worked for me in the past but your mileage may vary.

Spunj

regi

Also I think you can remove it from w2k (I know for sure you can't go from Non ACPI to ACPI like this). In device manager right click on the top node for the PC (something like ACPI Compliant PC) and choose properties/Update driver. Show all hardware, choose 'Standard PC'. Should remove ACPI. Has worked for me in the past but your mileage may vary.

That's exactly what I did ACPI sucks

po0k

Anandtech.com have an FAQ regarding safely removing ACPI from Win2k.
Might be worth a look.

Drazhar

OK, Why is ACPI so bad, i read a few of those FAQ's on the above site, and the feeling i got from them was that the non-uniformity of BIOS APM was bad. Everyone had a different way of doing the same thing, which is always bad.

Now agreed, anything that MS have to do with hardware cannot be good. the only thing they know about hardware is that it was something vaguely to do with their profit margins in computer software.

Also, do certain cards/devices require that ACPI be present? i saw that APM didnt recognise USB devices and teh like

TacT

I'm not sure of the exact details of why it's such a rat infested pos but people forewarned me and I never installed the over inflated pile of junk on any system I set up afterwards.

I had some problems on numerous machines and a big solution provider was to re-install with acpi disabled.

sutty

The reasion its so pants is that it uses an IRQ (9) some things try to use this IRQ at the same time.... anything on PCI slot 3 I think. The best way is to turn it off in the BIOS (get a moded bios for athlon systems) then install the OS again, this time by default the system wont use ACPI


hey presto... no more suckyness ever again

byte

Would this ACPI affect USB or Parallel ports too (see my uSB thread)?

And would everything still work (eg PCI cards) if I remove it?

This may explain why my DVB card would ONLY work in bottom PCI slot and none of the others

Gerry

Originally posted by sutty
The reasion its so pants is that it uses an IRQ (9) some things try to use this IRQ at the same time.... anything on PCI slot 3 I think. The best way is to turn it off in the BIOS (get a moded bios for athlon systems) then install the OS again, this time by default the system wont use ACPI


hey presto... no more suckyness ever again

You should possibly read up on acpi. The only thing you are right about is that acpi doesn't always work correctly. ACPI hides all the irq's from the operating system, and problems usually arise when the machines bios does not implement it correctly. The physical interrupt lines ( usually 4 ) do not get suddenly fused into one, devices still have their own interrupt, but this is sometimes not apparent to the operating system, and confusion abounds.

The IRQ that is presented to the system will vary from machine to machine, and irq 9 is not assigned to the same slot on every machine. If acpi is off, you should be able to change irq assignments in the bios, but you won't be able to change decisions that the motherboard designers made, like ( for example ) slot 2 and 4 sharing irq's, or perhaps slot 5 not being busmastering.

sutty

Phil if you look at what I was saying again you will see that what I mean is that. If you put a sound card in, it could endup using the same IRQ as ACPI. Which for some reson ACPI doesn't like. As for the PCI slot it shares with. I gave 3 as an example, if you look at your motherboard manul it will have a table of what IRQ shares with what and what PCI slot uses what IRQ by defult. I also never said anything about "all" the IRQ's fuseing into one... before you decide to take my posts apart please make sure you've read them right.

Gerry

The irq's acpi reports are not the real irq's, and since acpi is going to allocate all the irq's, I don't understand how only one device is going to be "sharing" with acpi.

sutty

Phil in the bios when you have ACPI turned on there, it reports ACPI using IRQ9 or so at the device post. I'm not talking about the OS.

GUI

ACPI can u use IRQ 9 /11..
ACPI isnt as bad as ye make it out to be be..
The method where it translates many pci devices via this irq is called irq steering also.

Kairo

ACPI sucks, it completely fux0red my Audigy

Apparently theres this big ****up beetween ABIT-KR7A motherboards and Audigys, but anyway..my Card worked grand for the first week or too, but I one day for some reason it started giving all these problems up.

I did a little digging up on the problem, and found out its a problem with ACPI actually flashing the SB card's firmware and corrupting it so its missing all but the most basic features..I cant even update my drivers :mad:

Neither Abit nor Creative Labs want to take responsibility for the problem, so neither will do a fix for it (a simple firmware flash should do it), and I cant get my card replaced because the same thing will happen again eventually.

For all those having trouble, disabling it at the Bios isnt enough, you actually have to reinstall Windows and choose to not install ACPI on startup, afaik. Might just be Windows XP

Drazhar

son of a b1tch, i made a thread about my Audigy going wonky. I have the KR7a-RAID, and it tells me if i try to set up the creative software that the card aint present. So ACPI is the problem here eh??

So the solution as far as you can see Kairo, is reinstall without ACPI??

Where did you find this out??

Why didnt the rest ouf you know??;)

regi

I have a KT7a and I was having problems with my soundblaster too

Kairo

More info here

Disabling ACPI wont fix your card Draz..Tho if you were to install a new Audigy, it would prevent it from being fried like the previous one.

Its way too late for me to get mine replaced. Worst think Is I cant run any Dos games with sound..for some reason it eats up CPU whenever sound is present. I get a solid 5 fps in doom with sound turned on..AND NO MIDI MUSIC!!

zAbbo

I was having some nasty BSOD problems earlier this week(IRQ not less or equal.........) every time switched the PC off,

So i tried this ACPI switching to standard PC mode, using XP Pro and all is fine now.

GUI

since ye are all killing ACPI :-)
Apparently u get better games performance in windowsxp when its not controlling ur hardware interface..
that is ur using standard pc

but tbh i think acpi rocks..
despite its problems !

zAbbo

Im getting a 400 points difference in 3dmark now, i`m not sure how that happened tbh, but whatever the reason, i`m well happy

With ACPI - 2064

Without ACPI - 2438

Identical test and drivers, using a Radeon 7000(fsc), both tests where clocked at 178/200

GUI

i might do a test actually..
my HAL is completely ****ed because..
i had win2k running on intel p3 setup then upgraded to
Athlon XP 1800
and used same windows install..

Windows didnt blue screen since hardware change but
anytype of hardware change and BSOD..

does ACPI to standard PC reset HAL?

I have read only way to reconfigure HAL is under a clean install of windows?

zAbbo

when i rebooted(from changing to standard), XP begin to install all the drivers again

I then upgraded the gfx driver manually using the same driver i was using as well as other updated drivers(instaed of using Xp standard drivers)

GUI

Baz..

it was just reassigning IRQ assignments
which it was taking from the BIOS

astrofool

i've had an abit: kt7, kt7a, kr7a, and now a kd7 all RAID, used all of them but the kd7, with both a sblive and audigy (only audigy on the kd7), on the first two I used win Me, and switched to XP after a while on the kt7a. I've had acpi enabled every time, and never even once have I ever experienced any problems with a sound card on these systems, not even small thing.

GUI

ya i think ACPI is getting killed from
users experiences of a particular chipset and sound card!

Overall the benefits it brings
with automatic irq assignment and allowing
to add a hundred devices to the limited 16 irqs available
to the processor is genius..

ACPI brought about true user friendly plug and play

spongebob

if it works, normally it works first time, lovely

if it don't ouch, its a real hassle to fix.

plug n pray

M

zAbbo

maybe it was just having issues with my config, either way its working ok now, and with some performance improvement.

GUI

bazH ..
no its not just ur configuration.

its been proven in benchmarks
win2k/xp perform faster in gaming
without acpi installed..

but these are usually gaming freaks
who like the 5 extra fps :-)

Im finished talking about ACPI :-)

and im tired lol :-)

saik

Motherboards are of a cack standard. Motherboard reviews are not much better.
ACPI is cack.
and nobody is really sure what it does.
all i know is that, in some cases it boosts frame rates, it keeps your idle cpu temp lower , sometimes it allows you to stick ****eloads of pci cards in without conflicting..... but other times it drops frame rates, causes no end of hassle from conflicting irqs, makes quake3 input feel like ****e. i believe it is something to with microsoft. i've never found an article offering anything other than umms awws and maybes about it.

i think it is something intended for good , that went terribly terribly wrong

what would happend to pc's if they came with more interrupts?
like instead of 16, there were 1024 or something.... i take it interrupts interrupt something.. maybe the cpu? would it be a move for good or bad...

GUI

acpi is nothing to do with microsoft!!!!!!!!!!!

it's an industry standard to allow faster "on now" access to pcs..
i.e instant returning of pcs from power management..

this was done by allowing the device drivers full access to the motherboards..
this initative came out in 98 and
was first implemented in win98 se..

ACPI also supports hot plug and play pci slots..
automatic irq reallocation..

http://www.itpapers.com/cgi/PSummaryIT.pl?paperid=11836&scid=273

go to microsoft.com and enter acpi in search bar

also theres a white paper on the acpi standard floating around.

GUI

IRQs are interrupt lines that notify the cpu that it requires cpu time..

its not really practicle to have more then 16..
and u cant access 6 or 7 of them in NT Architecture..
there reserved

sutty

Originally posted by GUI_XP
acpi is nothing to do with microsoft!!!!!!!!!!!

Ummm.. yeah it does, it was made my Compaq, Microsoft, intel and two others, see the below link

ACPI

sutty

Ok, here one for you's all...

Whats the 4 power states of ACPI?

*Note*

I know them.... just seeing who else does

Koopa

gui_xp:
its not really practicle to have more then 16..
and u cant access 6 or 7 of them in NT Architecture..
there reserved

actually there are 16 interrupts because when that part of the processors was designed, it was deemed "enough" ... its about time they re-designed processors to handle more than 16 irq's

also, acpi (interrupt sharing) is a step backwards as far as real-time-response systems are concerned, the whole point of having irq's is that components can be assigned a priority, eg. on a client system, input devices should have the highest irq, then the display, then the sound, then the other things like hard disk etc., on most current pcs, hard disks have the highest irq because pc makers try to make pcs "idiot-proof" instead of optimising them for performance (case being, suppose the OS wants to access some files, but the user keeps clicking the mouse/keyboard around like a maniac, etc)

GUI

ya thats why i said usually 6 or 7 are reserved..
everyone has gotta have a keyboard :-)

I remember reading that i think its
0,1,2,3,4 that are reserved for floppy,com ports,kb..

but that was for the original windows nt architecture.
where the rule was "no partying on the hardware" :-)

_CreeD_

ACPI doesnt just affect Audigy's/SB's, just about every performance Soundcard manufacturer out there recommends disabling it (Ive had issues with it with the Live/Audigy/Echo Gina24/Delta 44). Its grand for a simple machine but pants for performance. Disable it, Enable APIC mode and you're grand.

Gerry

Originally posted by Koopa
actually there are 16 interrupts because when that part of the processors was designed, it was deemed "enough" ... its about time they re-designed processors to handle more than 16 irq's

also, acpi (interrupt sharing) is a step backwards as far as real-time-response systems are concerned, the whole point of having irq's is that components can be assigned a priority, eg. on a client system, input devices should have the highest irq, then the display, then the sound, then the other things like hard disk etc., on most current pcs, hard disks have the highest irq because pc makers try to make pcs "idiot-proof" instead of optimising them for performance (case being, suppose the OS wants to access some files, but the user keeps clicking the mouse/keyboard around like a maniac, etc)

Well, the ide controllers have been assigned high irq's for years. Normally the primary gets 14 and the secondary 15. I'm not sure how much difference irq priority makes these days. Masking can be used to allow low priority interrupts execute while a high priority one is running, so its not a very clear cut situation. Also the irq's from 8 onwards are on a separate irq pic, cascaded from irq 2.

Actually I found the following irq priorities on this page:

http://www.korg.com/oasys_pci_faq_html/troubleshooting/optimizing_windows.htm#high-priority_irq

Highest Lowest

0, 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Which is probably not what most people were expecting, but it means that 9,10,11 are quite high priority irq's, and that 3-7, which are normally used for undemanding devices have low priority irq's, as you might expect.

GUI

why do graphics card usually get irq 5 on acpi pcs
under 2k architecture, 2k and xp ?
makes no sense

Koopa

Well, the ide controllers have been assigned high irq's for years.

i know, thats my whole point, they should change it

I'm not sure how much difference irq priority makes these days. Masking can be used to allow low priority interrupts execute while a high priority one is running

it makes a big difference in things like games, and maybe some real-time-response systems as well, if you dont use your pc for any of those though, then it wont make a big difference.. apart from minor annoyances like, if you have a mouse on irq 7, itll freeze whenever you get hdd lag (if windows tries to access the hdd and its powered down, etc), while if you have a mouse on irq 12, that doesnt happen

that list thing is interesting, itd explain some things like the above (irq 14 vs irq 12 not causing irq 12 to lag, etc), but i dunno how accurate it is, like it doesnt include irq 2? irq 2 on my system is the programmable interrupt controller btw

it would really explain why they put keyboard on irq 1 though, keyboard = input device = needs high irq, etc.. i always thought this was a ****-up or something, like "why would they put an input device on such a low irq on a client system"

Wossack

Windoze XP reg hack, just on the subject of IRQs and priorities:

http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=guide&dId=120&dPage=6


Quote from above site.
Tweak #12 - Prioritizing IRQs
With this tweak we can increase the priority given to any IRQ number,
thereby improving the performance of that component. The most
common component this tweak is used for is the System CMOS/real
time clock, which improves performance across the board.

Slutmonkey57b

acpi = teh ****!

Having read this thread, I disabled acpi, expecting a nice solution to usb problems.

Whammo my pc's fu.cked. 30 minutes later, I give in, switch it back on, and blammo, one working pc.

acpi = teh **** man!

Gerry

You have to reinstall windows sometimes to make the switch properly, or you can try removing all hardware from device manager and let it redetect it all.

Typedef

Or just use Linux damnit, and switch off ACPI in your kernel config.
Oh and don't forget to turn off said hardware absurdity in thine BIOS proggie.

saik

right, i'll post again. i've been getting flamed loads recently so this should be good.

Microsoft played a major part in the design of ACPI. That's not bull****. AFAIK, what they did was implement the standard into their OS's, so that would be a large proportion of the software that controls/allows the devices interact with the motherboard. non? well you *pretty much* said so yourself GUI (aha). It isn't *merely* to allow faster access to suspended pc's either. Again, it does a whole ton of other sh*te too.

Also about the practicality of > 16 irq's, as sam says, the whole irq system was developed way back in the day, before doom, the 486 etc etc, they said "lol, you'll never need more than 16 irq's, lol" or only implemented 16 as they didnt have the endless list of peripherals/components available today and wanted to cut costs/ speed things up. Times have changed, surely.

I'm grateful for the links. They explain quite a bit. Other people have had more luck than I finding out about ACPI. Cheers to gerry and koopa, cos, armed with the list of irq's i can begin the task of reassigning everything to the right irq so that it works properly for me personally. grr mouse on irq7 grr. so it'll be fixed jejeje. i used to think this was a ps2/usb thing it all comes down to the irq's :O

About 2k and XP assigning the gfx card to irq 5, well, how did you check this...? On an ACPI enabled system, half the time you can't be sure what irq the thing is actually on. Best bet is to go to the motherboard manual and see which irq = which slot. Sometimes SANDRA gets it right, but in my (recent) experience it gets it wrong too.

And what if ACPI does actually assign the gfx controller to 5 under acpi? it makes no sense. BING. That's the whole point. ACPI SUX. Imagine if, you boot your newly installed win2k to find everything reporting as being on irq11 and your sound, network and graphics cards conflicting for some unknown reason. It makes my computer and others' do stupid sh*t.

And slutmonkey, course your pc was f*cked. You took the legs out from under it. You can sometimes get away with removing ACPI without re-installing the OS, but it only worked once for me, and not very well :> You have to find out more about your usb problem before you can blame ACPI.

It's interesting (to me anyway) that the ACPI Controller thingammy takes up irq 9, and my system feels far more responsive/smooth when ACPI is off. IRQ 9 being quite high up on the list.

If ACPI actually f*cking worked right half the time, then I'd be as enthusiastic about it as GUI is. Also, I'm aware that it actually does work properly on some computers... so if it aint broke don't fix it :>

Slutmonkey57b

Yeah, I figured reinstalling windoze would work. But it just struck me as too much effort and the sprog was trying to gum the side of the desk.

So clearly as a result of my experiment,

acpi = teh sh!t.

Thread Closed.

Slutmonkey57b

Thread re-opened.

I nominate myself for post of the month for that one.

I was laughing all the way to the fridge.

Thread closed.

GUI

i was just saying for the average joe-so..
acpi has given them easier plug and play..
not like in the days when u popped in a card and u
were there manually looking for free
IO Ports,memory ranges and interrupts and
that was seldom rarely if worked.

I joined the mob last week and switched this box
from acpi to standard pc..
took 8 reboots
WTF is that about :-)

Like i have alot of external usb1.1 and usb2.0 stuff
but 8 is a record lol :-)
Times i did it before it was 1 or 2 i remem

sutty

from the times I've done it, its one for the on board controlers, one for the video card, one for the sound card...I thing there are one or two more. But most of the time I just use a moded BIOS from the get go to turn it off. If its off in the BISO when you install 2k it will install the system as standerd by defult.

Slut: How was your PC F**Ked when you turned off ACPI? Did it not boot? I've never had problems with turning it off when needed. but I find a reinstall is best as the system is clean and doesn't have all old devices installed

GUI

sutty..

ive seen issues BSOD when turning some ACPI pcs to Standard PC..

msft dont recommend it at all..
recommend clean install and selecting F6 key in setup
to specify standard pc

im presume its device drivers having problems,they were originally configure on ACPI interface ?
ACPI is gives device driver management of mobo..

ive actually learnt something from this thread :-)

sutty

I think whats happing with the BSOD is that when you change it to standerd, the system picks up the new IRQ's as the hardware defaults. IE: AGP slot and PCI slot 1 sharing an IRQ, USB and PCI Slot 3 Sharing an IRQ. This might be causing some probs when the system first changes over. If you look in your manual for the motherboard it will have what slots share with what. when you have as much of the PCI cards off the sharing slots, then you mightn't see this problem. an other thing to try is turing off USB in the BIOS for the change over. then once you are happy with the system working, turn it back on and see what happens.

OH and on that note, remember what people where saying about a mouse using IRQ 7? well was said mouse a USB one? seeing as all devices on USB use the one IRQ... the one the USB controler uses. The other IRQ's that keyboards and mouse use (cant remember what they are at the moment) are for the PS\2 ports at the back of the PC AFAIK

_CreeD_

You can run into major problems switching if you use a USB mouse/kbd, as when XP redetects all hardware on reboot they will refuse to work. So you reboot....xp presumes things didnt go well and then decides to redetect again...ad infinitum.
New motherboards can use APIC to allocate up to 24 IRQ's btw. It's just been ignored since ACPI stepped in (and most folks presume it's a typo...well, I did ).