ACPI = teh pants

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 ).

byte

I just disabled APCI to see if it would fix my USB/parallel problem and umm, no, it didn't. I did get a box saying it detected Epson 460 but that's about it! I now have a new problem. When I shut down, I get a message saying it's safe to turn my pooter off. Before this, it just switched off automatically. Is there something I can change to fix this?

GUI

no proper management on standard pcs..

thats a drawback of standard pc..

sorry man

regi

Although turning off ACPI fixed my own computer problems, I'd just like to say that turning off ACPI isn't the answer to all of life's problems... for that, I recommend alcohol.

byte

Originally posted by Regi
Although turning off ACPI fixed my own computer problems, I'd just like to say that turning off ACPI isn't the answer to all of life's problems... for that, I recommend alcohol.

Alcohol! Yeah, I'll try that now and see if that'll fix the problem! It will for the drinking duration I'm sure!

sutty

Originally posted by irishbyte
I just disabled APCI to see if it would fix my USB/parallel problem and umm, no, it didn't. I did get a box saying it detected Epson 460 but that's about it! I now have a new problem. When I shut down, I get a message saying it's safe to turn my pooter off. Before this, it just switched off automatically. Is there something I can change to fix this?

byte, you should do some reading up on things like this before you go messing about with them. the message saying it now safe to turn off your "pooter" is not a problem. ACPI auto turns off the PC with software, when you turn off ACPI you get this message. all it means is that windows has shut everything down and now is save to turn off.... like it say's

As for your problem... what is it? have you tryed to change what IRQ the parallel port uses in the BIOS?

afdarcy

Originally posted by irishbyte
When I shut down, I get a message saying it's safe to turn my pooter off. Before this, it just switched off automatically. Is there something I can change to fix this?

If it's WinXP, you can enable soft shutdown by going to Control Panel>Power Options and clicking on the advanced power management (APM) tab. Probably the same for Win2k.

AD

Gerry

Soft shutdown should be implemented by apm even if acpi is disabled, check that apm is enabled in your bios setup, then check in windows as afdarcy says.

byte

sutty
I did read up on it from this thread which is why I removed it. Not too worried about the shutdown problem though I would've thought there was a way of enabling it again.

My biggest priority is my printer. Now I do know there is nothing wrong with my parallel port. Since removing APCI, I have once again tried installing scanner (an Agfa Parallel) and lo and behold, it is now installed. So if the scanner can work via parallel then in theory the printer should work too as it's looped through the scanner.

I also have a problem completely removing printer drivers now (in the hope that reinstalling will fix). When I remove from Add/Remove in CP, the program still remains even after telling me it's successfully removed! May be of no relevance but would the lack of colour ink in the printer cause the problem?

afdarcy
It's not an option on my Power Options window. I am using Win 2000 Pro SP2 unless I do what Gerry has suggested and enable in the BIOS, though I can't say I've ever noticed this option in my BIOS (it's a Gateway, need I say more):rolleyes:

Spunj

Not really related to ACPI, but in relation to your printer irishbyte -check the bios and see what the parallel port is set at. Most these days have options like Normal, Bi-Direct, EPP, EPP/ECP (they're from my machine). I know some parallel devices won't work properly on some of those settings. Try setting it to EPP if its not already, then check the printer.

sutty

Irish I meant read up on the web, not on here. not everything gets coverd here.

As for the printer. Have you tryed not looping it through the scanner? As looping products through on parallel ports is iffy at best. most of the time the master product has to be the same make as the slaved one. Also the master one must be on the system. The two products must also support a loop like this. (not all printers do)