Re: sata_via

[Rich West <Rich.West@wesmo.com>]

Rich West wrote:
> Tejun Heo wrote:
>> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>>> Rich West wrote:
>>>> I was only curious as to what turning off power management support 
>>>> would buy with regard to the sata timeout issue.
>>>
>>>
>>> ACPI is not only power management.  It is all the information your 
>>> hardware conveys to your OS, about the setup and workings of your 
>>> hardware.
>>>
>>> Without ACPI, non-PM things like SMP, laptop dock/undock, and many 
>>> other gadgets fail to function (or are configured sub-optimally).
>>>
>>> ACPI sets up interrupt routing, and Linux history is _loaded_ with 
>>> _years_ of problem reports that appear as timeouts, only to be 
>>> resolved as ACPI interrupt bugs (aka BIOS bugs, since ACPI tables 
>>> come from BIOS).
>>
>> Also, please give a shot at the sacred "irqpoll".
>
> I've had bad luck in the past (with other machiens) when adding 
> "irqpoll" in that it had locked up the entire machine (not this one, 
> but others) after a very short period of time.  My only attempt at 
> using it, though, was to try to address an X server related issue, but 
> this is a non-user machine, so X isn't necessary, and, hence, it's at 
> runlevel 3 all of the time.
>
> So far, noapic and acpi=off seem to be working.. The system has been 
> up 8 days without any problems.. previously, a problem with the SATA 
> drive (details of which were part of the first few messages in this 
> thread) would surface anywhere between 15 minutes and 5-7 days after a 
> reboot.
>
> However, since I started this email, I tried firing up X (with noapci 
> and acpi=off both set), the machine locks up entirely.

Although a reboot with irqpoll set managed to fix that X problem. :)

-Rich