I just want to repeat some observations I made over time here: I have
seen this on quite a few machines. Though solutions vary and I am not
sure there is a good automated way yet. The basic problem is that using
lower C-states has some effects on the timer tick sources normally used
(lapic and tsc stop). In general, the kernel tries to detect that and
use a broadcast mechanism that takes the timer device to fire an
interrupt (irq0) when the kernel should wake up. On newer boards that
timer is hardware emulated using the hpet.

In the simplest case, the bios does not initialize the chipset
correctly. There is a acpi bios entry which tells the OS to which apic
pin the timer is really connected to. Sometimes this is wrong and
"acpi_skip_timer_override" does help. One way to test for it is to look
at irq0 in /proc/interrupts. This number should increment at least on
one cpu.

But I have seen this odd case on my netbook, where the timer interrupt
increments and still I had those weird issues with the system being
stuck until I pressed a key. Which seems to be a strange case of the
timer interrupt not being sufficient to wake up the system (which is
something I still need to get explained by experts). In that case the
i915 card also has the issue of not triggering interrupts on sync which
usually seems to keep systems alive enough. Plus the other devices that
usually keeps the system busy (ethernet and ahci) was using MSI
interrupts, which also seems to insufficient. In this constellation
"pci=nomsi" seems to help well enough as it causes enough other
interrupts to be triggered.

If nothing else helps, there might be a chance to prevent the system to
go into the deeper c-states at all: "processor.max_cstate=<nr>" (or when
intel_idle is used "intel_idle.max_cstate=<nr>"). One would see the
result in powertop. This comes at the expense of higher power usage
though.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/217849

Title:
  Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty 64 "hiccup" on Sager notebook.

-- 
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs

Reply via email to