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."
Carpentry and computer power failures (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
Re:Carpentry and computer power failures (Score:5, Funny)
* more powerful based on the amount of energy used to perform the same tasks
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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?
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Percussive Maintenance is an art and a science...
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Sarah or Bristol? Can I get a sportsman's double?
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Interesting tidbit: some theater stage surfaces are black linoleum. You can nail things into the floor to secure them, and the nail holes will heal completely (for small nails) or almost completely for larger ones (except for quite large nails, which still leave a neat hole). A screw will tear the shit out of the surface. I learned that from a professional tech director when I was helping build some sets.
Summary: not a Linux problem, but a BIOS problem (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Re:Summary: not a Linux problem, but a BIOS proble (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Summary: not a Linux problem, but a BIOS proble (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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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
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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.
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Your point is larg
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Make up your mind. Scum or "weazels". If you weren't a retard, you would understand that scum is around the bottom of the food chain, while weasels occupy a niche at the higher end of the food chain. Nothing in common, whatsoever. Things that eat scum, in turn feed other things, which weasels prey upon. I know the concept is difficult to grasp, for one of your limited mental capacities - but please, try to make the effort. You'll be so proud of yourself, and your mommy and daddy will be proud too! Go
Re:Summary: not a Linux problem, but a BIOS proble (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
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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.
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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 ;)
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.)
Re:Summary: not a Linux problem, but a BIOS proble (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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?
Re:Summary: not a Linux problem, but a BIOS proble (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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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.
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Is there... more to that article? All it quotes from Microsoft is this:
- Bill Gates, 1999
Then it goes on to say:
Re:Summary: not a Linux problem, but a BIOS proble (Score:5, Informative)
Did you read the linked PDF at all? Here's what the rest of it said:
In summary, Bill Gates explicitly wanted to break ACPI on Linux.
Just this memo (Score:2)
What a Dick.
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Why does it have to be that they are hostile to Linux?
it doesn't have to be, that's why I'm asking the question. It COULD be, and it HAS BEEN IN THE PAST, specifically in the case of ACPI Microsoft DELIBERATELY created a tool that would make an invalid ACPI table for use with non-Windows operating systems.
Why do you tin foil nuts always make it out to be some conspiracy against Linux?
Because it so often is. BTW, tin foil hats concentrate radio signals at the center of the skull, I guess you aren't keeping up though. There was a test at MIT.
why should any OEM give a fuck whether their desktop products (which are going to require good suspend/resume/battery support etc) work with OS that is an economically insignificant portion of the market?
Because Linux is continually gaining market share. And in any case, again in the case of ACPI, Micro
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The sad part is ultimately
...that you took the opportunity to make an anti-Linux rant when the problem is that Microsoft released tools designed to break Linux compatibility. This is not a case where Linux failed to follow a standard, but one where Linux followed the standard to its detriment, and only by breaking the standard (pretending to be Windows) can it work properly as a result of this deliberate sabotage for which Microsoft really ought to be sued given that Bill Gates himself asked for it to be done this way and the proof
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First, you seem to confuse OEMs and MS. OEMs don't care about Linux one way or the other, but MS obviously does.
Second, as to why we blame MS's antipathy to Linux for ACPI cruft...
Because Billy G said so. [slated.org] {pdf}
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That just proves he wrote that email twelve years go. And the email describes that hes thinking about it. So what? I wonder if you think that every single weird thought that gates ever had became official company policy.
The tool that Microsoft wrote spits out multiple ACPI tables. The one for Windows is correct. The one that Linux is supposed to use per the spec is incorrect. There's no reason for it to spit out an incorrect table; if it must have a separate table for Windows, then put the same data in the other-os table. I wonder if you think that when Bill Gates was running Microsoft it was fashionable to ignore his suggestions and directives.
Re:Summary: not a Linux problem, but a BIOS proble (Score:4, Informative)
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That has happened before so many times you cant count.
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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. :)
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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We can for NDIS drivers, it'd be interesting to write another binary wrapper for the Windows drivers but it means trusting more non-open code in the kernel's memory space at run time.
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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)
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.
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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.
Re:"serious bug" my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:"serious bug" my ass (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Yes, NIH [dreamwidth.org], apparently.
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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...
Re:"serious bug" my ass (Score:4, Interesting)
"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]
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the old Microsoft mantra: embrace, extend, extinguish...
Re:"serious bug" my ass (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Chances are, the average user isn't even going to notice.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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)
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
Why is it now assumed everyone uses grub? (Score:2)
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Yes, my mistake. I shouldn't skim read.
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In my day... (Score:2)
Who are these pansies that use a boot loader at all? I enter in the machine code by hand, that's the only way to be sure.
Youngsters today just don't appreciate how toggling in absolute addresses and machine instructions via front panel switches could build character. It especially expanded one's vocabulary of expletives and expressiveness in screaming them. The PDP-8 only had 12-bit words which saved a lot of toggling, so after a little practice it could be booted to having multiple teletype[*] terminals active in less than 10 minutes. Confession: the last minute or two were reading in from magnetic tape, whose drivers were
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I see you children haven't figured out the butterfly yet. First step: bang the rocks together guys.
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bah. loadlin. ;-)
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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.
Re:tl;dr (Score:4, Interesting)
Sigh... (Score:2)
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"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.
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Why not us a database? (Score:3)
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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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.
Re:Never upgrade your Linux... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Perhaps I was not clear enough. At least for what I was talking about, for common problems Windows will flash something at you saying "Push button to fix." As opposed to here on /. where someone will post a 15 step to fixing whatever it is.
I'm not talking about the hard stuff, but the stuff where my wife asks me "Is it OK to push 'Yes'?"
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Always upgrade your Linux distribution in place.
Apt-get dist-upgrade.
Works every time.
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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.
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Obligatory quote:
Easy answer (Score:2)
Hippies. They fight the power.
ACPI has ALWAYS favoured Windows... (Score:1)
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
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Re:ACPI has ALWAYS favoured Windows... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I guess Microsoft intentionally designed the tool so that it would bluescreen Windows and create a positive customer impression.
Windows has ACPI-related problems because Microsoft is technically incompetent as an organization, possibly because of culture and/or processes; and because of drivers which are out of Microsoft's control. Linux has ACPI-related problems because Microsoft is unscrupulous as an entity, and illegally abused its monopoly position. The drivers are [mostly] in the kernel and can be and are improved when it becomes possible to wring the proper information out of vendors. There's a pretty big difference there.
HDs won't sleep in Linux (Score:2)
Re:No more Moronix, please! (Score:5, Informative)