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Intel Bug Power Linux

Nailing the Cause of Recent Linux Power Issues 156

An anonymous reader writes "For the Linux kernel power regressions that were found a few months ago, and hit in Ubuntu 11.04, Phoronix has found the regression that's still present in the Linux 3.0 kernel. The power regression is caused by a change in ASPM, the Active-State Power Management, for PCI Express support."
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Nailing the Cause of Recent Linux Power Issues

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  • by mpoulton ( 689851 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @04:49AM (#36581700)
    Interesting headline. I was trying to figure out how old-school manual construction work would be responsible for tricky power supply problems on Linux machines only.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Tsk, tsk.

      Nailing doesn't necessarily mean "old-school manual construction work" -- among the delights that are power tools, a MAPP nail gun is perhaps the most heavenly.

      And using one to shoot a half-dozen nails into a PSU would cause problems, though I too fail to see the Linux connection.

    • by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @06:43AM (#36582056)
      The headline demonstrates a skill that the Linux community seems to lack: the modern corporate marketing mindset. What the Linux community should have done is used this extra power consumption to their advantage: Linux, now more powerful than ever!*



      * more powerful based on the amount of energy used to perform the same tasks
    • My first thought was that I missed the launch of some new "Linux Power" magazine (something akin to Nintendo Power). I didn't quite understand the "Nailing the Cause" part of the headline in that context though. =)
    • Interesting headline. I was trying to figure out how old-school manual construction work would be responsible for tricky power supply problems on Linux machines only.

      Do you have trouble using contractions, too?

  • by ArsenneLupin ( 766289 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @04:50AM (#36581702)
    To sum up the article in 3 sentences:

    It's due to some buggy BIOSes not properly advertising power-saving features of PCIE cards. Older kernels didn't honor those BIOS hints, and disabled power to unused PCIE cards anyways (causing hangs in rare cases), whereas new kernels do the right thing (causing power wastage in lots of cases). The workaround is to specify pcie_aspm=force on the boot (Grub) command line, to tell the kernel to forge ahead, and just use power management on these cards regardless of the BIOS advice.

    • Is it possible that unused PCIE cards waste that much power? On Linux I drain my laptop's batter in under 2 hours, sometimes 1.5. On Win7 it used to take 3+ hours with brightness at 100% (because I was outdoors).

      DISCLAIMER: Author of this post is currently using Linux because of superior performance and availability of tools not available on Windows platform.

      • by daid303 ( 843777 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @05:18AM (#36581764)

        The article points out that there is also a power regression in the scheduler. Which is the next thing that the writer will look at.

      • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @05:23AM (#36581796) Journal
        Hard to say without the exact specs of the machine, and probably a bunch of test-probes clipped in awkward places inside the laptop; but the overall trend in hardware does seem to have been toward ever higher theoretical maximum-if-we-felt-like-burning-that-much power draw(remember back when a ~50-80 watt CPU was considered a howling-mad-danger-to-self-and-others overclock/overvolt insanity demandng nerves of steel and custom cooling? Now boring retail CPUs have TDPs in the ~130 watt range); but a corresponding increase in the ability of hardware to throttle various clocks(CPU, GPU, high sped busses), sometimes cut Vcore as well, and turn off(or very nearly so) unused peripherals.

        Exactly where the delta exists vs. Windows seems to be a matter of some confusion; but unless Linux is just plain burning more CPU time for housekeeping purposes(which, one assumes, is the sort of things that the Big Serious Corporate users of 1000+ node commodity server/compute setups would have noticed by now), it likely rests largely in the hands of a (no doubt alarmingly large and ever changing) set of hardware-specific power throttling stuff whose responsibilities were designed to be divided between the buggy BIOS and the vendor's Windows drivers. If it were Just One Mistake, it'd likely have been quashed by now...
        • I think you're spot on. Over the last decade I've constantly read articles about broken hardware whereby the manufacturer simply hides in their windows drivers. Chances are extremely high any power regression is actually a case of extremely broken hardware more dramatically exposed because of a bug fixes and/or compliance improvements in the Linux implementation.

          Based on what I've read over the last decade, I definitely get the impression hardware bugs, specifically in power management, are fairly common. A

        • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          emember back when a ~50-80 watt CPU was considered a howling-mad-danger-to-self-and-others overclock/overvolt insanity demandng nerves of steel and custom cooling? Now boring retail CPUs have TDPs in the ~130 watt range

          Only if you're still using a Pentium-4. Most of the new i5s have 95W or less TDP and real-world measurements show they rarely go over 60W.

          The new i5 server/DVR I'm building should use less power than my old dual-core Atom when idle and only about 40W more under full load.

          • The average TDP and real world numbers have indeed fallen since the brief reign of the dual-die Prescott parts, those suckers were toasty. High end i7s(not the 95w Sandy Bridge ones, the original QPI-based LGA-1366 ones), though, still quote a 130 watt TDP(though they can also be had as low as 18watts, and I suspect that the market is vastly larger in the 18-60 range). Xeons are in the same boat. The Nehalem ones, still available, are up to 130 watts TDP, the Sandy Bridge ones up to 95.

            Your point is larg
      • by jonamous++ ( 1687704 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @06:28AM (#36582006)
        I'm using a Vaio S that gets 7+hr battery life in Windows, and under 2hr battery life in Fedora. The big problem that I see with this laptop is that Fedora is not utilizing the "hybrid" graphics system, and it is constantly running off of the graphics card instead of the integrated graphics (in windows, this brings the battery life to under 2 hours, as well). It would be nice to be able to switch that permanently to integrated to get the battery life.
        • Under Ubuntu, I'm using the integrated only, and offload to the real GPU using bumblebee [github.com], but the battery still drains too quickly.

        • Support for Hybrid GPU setups in the kernel has been supported for the last few releases. If you google for something like "linux gpu switcheroo" you should be able to find what I'm talking about. Yes, it was called "Switcheroo" by the original author of the code. The primary way of switching GPUs is through the /sys filesystem unless there are some GUI programs that do that for you.

        • The will soon be fixed if you have an ATi and use the FLOSS drivers. There is no need for 'hybrid graphics'-bla bla bla as you can achieve this purely with software lol.

          Some guy from Red Hat is now working on GPU distribution-stuff. That means being able to also run both at the same time. Currently the status on this is that he can now only do it by restarting the X.org server and just one GPU at the time with 'vga-switcheroo'.

          Progress is on its way ;)

      • On Linux I drain my laptop's batter in under 2 hours, sometimes 1.5. On Win7 it used to take 3+ hours with brightness at 100% .

        How long ago was that? Maybe your battery is nearing end of life.

        • It used to like a few months ago. The laptop is practically brand new. I had Win7 as a temporary solution while I was figuring out how to get hybrid graphics working on Linux.

      • Is it possible that unused PCIE cards waste that much power? On Linux I drain my laptop's batter in under 2 hours, sometimes 1.5. On Win7 it used to take 3+ hours with brightness at 100% (because I was outdoors).

        DISCLAIMER: Author of this post is currently using Linux because of superior performance and availability of tools not available on Windows platform.

        Probably depends strongly on the laptop and the drivers available for its hardware.

        On my 7½-year-old laptop (Sony VAIO VGN-A117S[*]) with original battery, the battery typically lasts slightly less than 2 hours, but even with intensive use it lasts more than 1½ hours. It runs Lubuntu 10.04 and it's years since any version of Windows dirtied its disk, so I can't do a direct comparison right now. As far as I recall, it lasted about 2½ hours on Windows XP when it was new (early 2004), and som

        • As far as I recall, it lasted about 2½ hours on Windows XP when it was new (early 2004), and somewhat less when running Warty or Breezy.

          I'm sure WinXP cannot compare in terms of power consumption to Win7 + latest drivers from hardware vendors. Sadly, in all other aspects, they don't differ by much. I might switch one day if the actual performance becomes on par with Linux. On the other hand, if Linux becomes better in power management, the switch would probably never become an option. (Hm... this reminds of of those Linux vs Windows discussions, with roles slightly reversed.)

    • by Manip ( 656104 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @05:17AM (#36581760)
      That is an accurate summation of the article; but calling things "right" and "wrong" is a little nieve. Windows treats this information very differently to Linux, and BIOS manufacturers are caught between the two. Simply advertising ASPM sounds good, unless it causes Windows to treat card without ASPM support as if they have it just because the bios advertised that the system supported it. Now current versions of Windows might act rationally in this regard, but XP and older are still highly prevalent particularly amongst corporate clients and governments.

      So I guess my point is - it isn't a simple right or wrong/black or white scenario. It is a messy, ugly, undocumented hack, that ultimately leaves nobody happy. Linux will likely wind up having to implement a hack too to fix this, which makes them no better or no worse than the bios manufacturers who did exactly the same thing.
      • by hitmark ( 640295 )

        Not sure, but is Windows using BIOS or drivers as a first reference for power saving support? As such, could this be yet a case of hardware shipped as known buggy and "cleaned up" via driver code?

      • That is an accurate summation of the article; but calling things "right" and "wrong" is a little nieve. Windows treats this information very differently to Linux, and BIOS manufacturers are caught between the two.

        In other cases this has been because microsoft wrote the tools and designed them to be hostile to Linux, e.g. ACPI. is there any of that here?

        • In other cases this has been because microsoft wrote the tools and designed them to be hostile to Linux, e.g. ACPI. is there any of that here?

          This is what he's talking about [osnews.com]. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that Microsoft could have deliberately made ACPI difficult for Linux to implement.

          • Is there... more to that article? All it quotes from Microsoft is this:

            It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work

            - Bill Gates, 1999

            Then it goes on to say:

            While we don't know if he actually managed to do just that (creating problems to other OSes to work well with ACPI), but if he did, it is a good explanation why ACPI has been flaky on the majority of x86 computers with anything else other than Windows (

            • Did you read the linked PDF at all? Here's what the rest of it said:

              From: Bill Gates
              Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
              To: Jeff Westorinen; Ben Fathi
              Cc: Carl Stork (Exchange); Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
              Subject: ACPI extensions

              One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows specific.

              It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the results is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

              Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

              Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

              Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

              In summary, Bill Gates explicitly wanted to break ACPI on Linux.

      • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @06:31AM (#36582018)
        Linux does thing the way they should be done according to standard. Windows does things they way they actually are done in the real world. The reason is simple: BIOS vendors noticed Windows doesn't follow the standard well, and made the reasonable assumption that the vast majority of users would run windows. Thus they deviated from the standard in order to better support it.
        • by drolli ( 522659 )

          That has happened before so many times you cant count.

        • One nice example is the problem with some laptops that you have to close the lid twice to make a machine suspend under Linux. This is due to an ACPI bug where the lid status remains in state "closed" on resume. Linux power management wants the transition to be exactly "open" -> "closed" for suspend, in Windows simply a lid event with state "closed" is enough.

          If you are skilled, you can also hack the ACPI DSDT and inject the new one on boot. :)

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Linux does thing the way they should be done according to standard. Windows does things they way they actually are done in the real world. The reason is simple: BIOS vendors noticed Windows doesn't follow the standard well, and made the reasonable assumption that the vast majority of users would run windows. Thus they deviated from the standard in order to better support it.

          More like Windows used to do it as per the standard. Then Microsoft realized a good chunk of the crap people buy doesn't support it pro

          • IANA HW geek, but I learned this lesson vicariously a long time ago: "Never design to the spec." Chips (TTL in this case) vary in performance, and some of them do better than spec, others do worse. In the particular case, the TTL-based CPU had a stack that was implemented using four chips (IIRC FIFOs, but I don't recall). The timing was based on the spec. As a result, those four 'identical' chips had to be matched - if a slower one came after a faster one, the CPU would crash. The difference in timing

        • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          The reason is simple: BIOS vendors noticed Windows doesn't follow the standard well, and made the reasonable assumption that the vast majority of users would run windows. Thus they deviated from the standard in order to better support it.

          I suspect it's more than there are people paid to clean up their turds in software, so companies don't care about crapping out defective hardware with a broken BIOS.

          When I was writing video drivers for Windows we'd often have to incorporate workarounds for broken host chipsets; I'm guessing all the other video card manufacturers were doing the same and the chipset manufacturers either didn't realise their AGP bus implementation was a heap of steaming monkey crap or didn't care.

      • Many moons ago there was some deep bitterness from some of the devs at the Ottawa Linux Symposium about the fact that hardware developers weren't actually following the specs but instead implementing their own, then just writing Windows drivers to work around their tweaks.

        Since Linux doesn't typically support pluggable hardware drivers from manufacturers (and they often don't care to write them), Linux was trying to communicate using the actual specifications, and failing. This has been a problem for year

    • by dc29A ( 636871 ) *

      causing hangs in rare cases

      - On new Sandy Bridge laptops, booting always caused hangs. I couldn't boot Linux (Arch or Ubuntu) if I had the power brick connected. Hanging is just one issue, another one is that the network card is unable to connect to the network. Also, if you dual boot, Windows might tweak with cards settings and when you reboot into Linux, it still hangs or simply can't connect to network. Solution is complete power off and rebooting without power brick being on. I even tried de-activating ASPM and didn't work (pcie

  • "serious bug" my ass (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @04:52AM (#36581712)

    The article is full of sensationalism like "serious bug", "major regression" to promote Phoronix and its "wonderful test suite". If you read it closely, you'll see they have seen a 10% increase in power consumption on just one of their test laptops that depends on BIOS settings. That particular laptop has a bug in its BIOS where it claims it wants to manage configuration of a particular piece of hardware, and new kernels obey that request. You can even tell the kernel to disregard BIOS and force power settings anyway.

    For me, improving power efficiency everywhere but that particular laptop is a major win. If you feel nice, you can even detect this particular buggy BIOS and ignore its request. But then, even after throrough fiddling, Phoronix guys weren't able to improve power usage by more than 15% even on this laptop, so it's not a big issue anyway.

    • I think you've being a little harsh, there isn't much in the way of hardware reviews for Linux so these guys doing them provides some service to the community.

      And if they'd detected 10% decrease in power consumption, the article would be just as sensationalist, only this time considered good. I never knew about the kernel option, now I do.

    • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @05:37AM (#36581830) Journal
      While this article is a touch overblown, stories like this make me profoundly pessimistic about the advent of EFI...

      Yeah, the BIOS pretty much sucks, and its horrible backwards-compatibility hackery makes purists cry; but the very fact that it sucks so much has had the basically positive effect of keeping vendors from trying to get too clever it. Given the results of their trying to do so(like everybody's favorite problem child, ACPI) this is probably a good thing.

      EFI, especially in conjunction with CPUs that have hardware level virtualization support, is pretty much an entire second OS, moonlighting as a bootloader, that you either have to perform coreboot-platform-port level black magic to replace(if the board even allows you, you might also have to defeat some sort of firmware integrity check) or lament unto your motherboard vendor in hope of getting fixed. If buggy BIOSes are an issue now, buggy EFI will be a fucking nightmare. The last thing we want is more and more stuff going on under the surface, with development handled by motherboard OEMs with, to put it charitably, no OS-development experience worth putting on a CV...

      At least the suckitude of the classic BIOS created a de-facto pressure toward "let the bootloader bootload and then GTFO so that the OS can handle things". Ideally, we could have just had a modern, lessons-learned, minimal bootloader, that could skip the brief sojourn to the 80s; but still bugger off as fast as possible. Instead, we are facing the looming advent of having every computer running two OSes with hardware access, even after the bootloading is done, the resultant messy(but model/firmware-revision specific) infighting of which are going to make ACPI look like an architecturally elegant story of idyllic peaceful cooperation...
      • by David Gerard ( 12369 ) <(ku.oc.draregdivad) (ta) (todhsals)> on Monday June 27, 2011 @05:50AM (#36581890) Homepage

        You are entirely correct. See Matthew Garrett's blog [dreamwidth.org] for the icky details of EFI on Linux. He makes this hideous piece of shit work for a living.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Heh, that reminds me of when I did some work for a hard drive manufacturer. I got to see a lot of their firmware source and other software they wrote. Total. Complete. Shit. All of it. The whole reason they needed me was to fix their poorly written software that they couldn't even figure out how to debug.

          Engineers should never be allowed to write software, ever.

      • by hitmark ( 640295 )

        Heh, i think it was Torvalds that decried ACPI as insanity. Not helped by Microsoft having a test suite that deviate at various places from the Intel equivalent. But what will the OEMs use? Why, the Microsoft one...

        • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @06:41AM (#36582044) Journal
          This behavior is by design:

          "One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.
          It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.
          Maybe there is no way Io avoid this problem but it does bother me. Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open."

          William H. Gates III [slated.org]
    • by dnaumov ( 453672 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @05:45AM (#36581858)

      The user is not going to give a shit. The user will see that Windows doesn't suffer from this increase in power consumption and will decide that Linux is inferior.

      • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        Chances are, the average user isn't even going to notice.

        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Chances are, the average user isn't even going to notice.

          I'm sorry, but the average user knows how a clock works. Whether it's their computer clock, the wall clock, the wrist watch or their cell phone, they'll notice that their laptop runs out of battery faster under Linux.

          • by marnues ( 906739 )
            The average user is never going to compare them on equivalent hardware.
            • by rtaylor ( 70602 )

              Why do you think this would matter to a typical user?

              They will simply notice that Solution A allows X usage and Solution B allows Y usage; either way they're not buying the machine with Linux pre-loaded.

    • by nzac ( 1822298 )

      Do you own a laptop that you use the full battery life on?
      How is not a serious bug where all of a sudden your computer looses 10 percent battery life for no good reason due to core software. Since its not universal I guess you could argue its not a regression, if you want. I remember higher percentages being thrown around, certainly if it goes past 20 percent it becomes the kind of thing people stop using Linux over, Linux is already pretty terrible on some laptops due to having to use generic drivers.

      I hav

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Phoronix guys weren't able to improve power usage by more than 15% even on this laptop, so it's not a big issue anyway.

      15% from 6hours make it roughly one hour so I cannot say this issue is really minor. I'd even dare to say that every such detail does count since most hardware vendors tailor their products exclusively for Windows and the fact that Linux even works is a wonder.

      And please don't judge Phoronix harshly. It's one of a very few websites which actually drive Linux development. Yes, Michael li

  • tl;dr (Score:3, Informative)

    by OliWarner ( 1529079 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @04:55AM (#36581720) Homepage
    Add pcie_aspm=force to your boot options.

    Test it by editing grub (which is a temporary edit that will be lost next boot) first and test out suspend, hibernate, etc.

    If that works, edit your grub configuration files. For ubuntu users this means editing /etc/default/grub and editing the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable. Then call sudo update-grub.
    • I can't stand it and immediately dump it for lilo as soon as I've done an install. I just want the boot loader to load the OS and get the hell out of town. End of. I don't need a boot "enviroment" thanks.

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Some of us also run headless machines (these things called "servers"), and grub is by default head-oriented.
        Making it work correctly for headless systems where there may or may not be a serial console connected at boot time is an exercise in patience, as the examples given assume that either (a) you have a network and VNC, or (b) serial is always connected and there will always be a person present to press keys when needed.

        Yet, LILO isn't well supported anymore, so when you need to boot specific file system

        • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          WTF are you talking about? If you can't get LILO to work with headless servers perhaps you should pick another career. How do you think it was done before GRUB came along, magic??

          FFS.

          • by arth1 ( 260657 )

            WTF are you reading?
            The post you replied to was complaining about Grub and how it is far from trivial to work on headless systems. not LILO.

    • In my case, this did not lead to perceived improvement power saving. Battery indicator still reports 1.5hr, and the batter is 66% drained in about a hour, so I'm guessing the prediction would be accurate. On the same system, I used to be able to squeeze out more than 3 hours under Windows 7. However, it has to be noted that performance was dramatically lower on Windows 7, too.

  • Machines like mine are probably the cause of the offending commit. Since maverick I had to force ASPM off on it or use lucid kernel because it caused frequent hard locks.
    • And IMHO... Some power wastage on some systems is less of an issue than random crashes on others. If people force ASPM and machine starts crashing, they will know what went wrong...
      • by Anonymous Coward

        "Some power wastage on some systems is less of an issue" ... yes of course, until users start jumping ship because "their laptop lasts longer/runs cooler with windows".
        I've seen it happen, and issues like this don't help at all.

        • The machine crashing randomly is CERTAIN to drive them away while power issue may or may not.
  • by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @05:49AM (#36581878)

    Would it work to have the kernel default to using whatever the BIOS indicated, but also have a database of overrides based on the exact card model?

    • by tepples ( 727027 )
      Because the makers of cards might decline to contribute to such a database of overrides.
      • by DrXym ( 126579 )

        Because the makers of cards might decline to contribute to such a database of overrides.

        But users and commercial distributions can. And makers could be compelled to as well assuming there was a Linux specific certification they were after which included it as a compliance requirement.

        • by tepples ( 727027 )

          And makers could be compelled to as well assuming there was a Linux specific certification they were after which included it as a compliance requirement.

          Makers of PCs and peripherals for the home and small-business markets don't care about any sort of Linux-specific certifications.

          • by DrXym ( 126579 )

            Makers of PCs and peripherals for the home and small-business markets don't care about any sort of Linux-specific certifications.

            Well they would care if people vocally told them why they favoured some rival's hardware over their own. At the end of the day it's the same as food getting certified as kosher / vegetarian. Companies would rather not do it but if they earn more sales than they lose in obtaining certification then it's worth it.

            • by tepples ( 727027 )

              Companies would rather not do it but if they earn more sales than they lose in obtaining certification then it's worth it.

              My point is that companies often don't think they'll "earn more sales than they lose" by supporting GNU/Linux. Some companies have used the excuse that obtaining certification would require disclosing specifications that include know-how licensed from a third party under a non-disclosure agreement.

  • Never upgrade your Linux distribution in place.

    Have 2 (or more) OS partitions of about 20GB each.

    Install your OS's to partition 1.

    Install your upgraded version to partition 2.

    Easily switch back and forth.

    Oh, and keep a separate /home partition.

    • And people wonder why Linux is not catching on as a desktop OS? "Problem X? Easy fix..... " 15 steps later "See? Easy!" Even MS, which I can't stand, does it easier. Note I said 'easier,' not 'better.'
      In here are tech folk. Out there are "Ooh, shiny" and "I push this button?" folk.

      • by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Monday June 27, 2011 @07:35AM (#36582322) Homepage

        Yes. 30 years of Microsoft sabotaging competitors great and small does make it hard for anyone else to get a toe hold.

        As always, this situation depends on how demanding your expectations are and whether or not you can put up with crap you're forced to put up with.

        Microsoft thinks it needs dirty tricks and that it's product can't survive on it's own merit.

    • by Hatta ( 162192 )

      Always upgrade your Linux distribution in place.

      Apt-get dist-upgrade.

      Works every time.

      • Unless you hit a key in the middle of a previous upgrade, and can't hunt down what component is causing the complaining about only being able to do a partial upgrade.

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Obligatory quote:

        <@insomnia> it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
        <@insomnia> cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig

  • Hippies. They fight the power.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    ACPI: RSDT 00000000bf780000 0003C (v01 7593MS A7593300 20100210 MSFT 00000097)
    ACPI: FACP 00000000bf780200 00084 (v01 7593MS A7593300 20100210 MSFT 00000097)
    ACPI: DSDT 00000000bf780480 06E90 (v01 A7593 A7593300 00000300 INTL 20051117)
    ACPI: APIC 00000000bf780390 000AC (v01 7593MS A7593300 20100210 MSFT 00000097)
    ACPI: MCFG 00000000bf780440 0003C (v01 7593MS OEMMCFG 20100210 MSFT 00000097)
    ACPI: OEMB 00000000bf78e040 0007A (v01 7593MS A7593300 20100210 MSFT 00000097)
    ACPI: HPET 00000000bf78a480 00038 (v01 7593M

    • ACPI vendors always favored windows, because that is just what most of the users will run. With the exception of server boards, non-windows users are a vanishingly tiny percentage, and scarcely worth the time to test for even briefly. It's a self-sustaining business advantage, as is seen so often in the technology sector: The dominant platform is the most widely supported, which helps to ensure it's continuing dominance.
      • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday June 27, 2011 @07:52AM (#36582446) Homepage Journal

        ACPI implementors (what is an ACPI vendor? can I buy it by the pound, or is it sold by the unit?) favored Windows, because Microsoft built a tool for creating ACPI tables that intentionally craps on all other operating systems, INTENTIONALLY building an invalid table for use with non-Windows operating systems. Linux now claims to be Windows in order to get a table that works. Bill Gates proposed this "feature" personally.

        The dominant platform is the one supported by fraud and deceit, which helps to ensure its continuing dominance, and the proper use of apostrophes. No wait, that was me.

  • Unrelated to the problems mentioned here, there's still a lot of work to do to allow us to manage our power more efficiently in Linux. See what I posted in the previous discussion [slashdot.org].

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

Working...