Datasheet

“main” (Installation and Administration) — 2004/6/25 — 13:29 — page 367 — #393

Power Management

Caution

Problems Booting without ACPI

Some newer machines (especially SMP systems and AMD64

systems) need ACPI for conﬁguring the hardware correctly. On

these machines, disabling ACPI can cause problems.

Caution

Take a closer look at the boot messages, for example, with the command

dmesg | grep -2i acpi (or all messages, as the problem may not be

caused by ACPI) after booting. If an error occurs while parsing an ACPI

table, the most important table — the DSDT — can be replaced with an im-

proved version. In this case, the faulty DSDT of the BIOS will be ignored.

The procedure is described in Section 17.5.4 on page 373.

In the kernel conﬁguration, there is a switch for activating ACPI debug

messages. If a kernel with ACPI debugging is compiled and installed, ex-

perts searching for an error can be supported with detailed information.

If you experience BIOS or hardware problems, it is always advisable to con-

tact the manufacturer of the device. Although manufacturers may not al-

ways be able to provide assistance for Linux, it is still important that they

hear the word “Linux” as often as possible. Manufacturers will only take

the issue seriously if they realize that an adequate number of their cus-

tomers use Linux.

Additional documentation and help:

http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/acpi/acpi_howto.txt

(slightly outdated ACPI HowTo, incomplete)

http://www.cpqlinux.com/acpi-howto.html (more detailed

ACPI HowTo, contains DSDT patches)

http://www.intel.com/technology/iapc/acpi/faq.htm

(ACPI FAQ @Intel)

http://acpi.sourceforge.net/ (the ACPI4Linux project at

Sourceforge)

http://www.poupinou.org/acpi/ (DSDT patches by Bruno

Ducrot)

367SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server