> > On each of four machines I've installed recently--a Thinkpad X20, a > > generic 2xP3/833, a VA Research 2xP2/400, and a Netfinity 7500 > > (4xP3/500, I think), I've had to turn of ACPI because otherwise > > everything goes all pear-shaped. What good is it *supposed* to be?
All older machines with slightly differing implementations of ACPI (ACPI was a moving target for a while). Things have settled a bit recently (and the ACPI implementation in late-model Debian and SuSE (haven't tried RH) seem to have either coded around the weirdnesses in older mainstream systems, or the BIOS implementations have gotten better). Recent HPQ and xSeries boxes are just fine with ACPI turned on. What does it do? It provides you a standard API to probe environmental and configuration information about the hardware, and to invoke hardware functions like power management, etc. ACPI is good in that it's much more granular than APM was, and is a lot wider scope. You can get a wider range of system information through the ACPI APIs, which makes things like CIM and SNMP agents a lot easier to implement. As Chris mentioned, ACPI is also MP-safe, which will be important when those dual IA64 extended cores start showing up in laptops ...yum...8-) -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
