RedHat Drive Controller Freeze solution

May 20, 2002

The following information is provided by Steve Romero. Thank you Steve for the great information.

Hard Disk Controller Freeze after Reboot problem under RedHat.

I have discovered a very curious "solution" to this. I am currently running the 2.4.18-0.13 (from the RedHat Rawhide site) that is patched with the 20020404 ACPI patch. Note this patch will not cleanly install against the RedHat kernel requiring some manual intervention. I found that by configuring the kernel for ACPI and not APM and not APIC that the resulting kernel is able to do a reboot! An excerpt from my configuration follows:

CONFIG_MK7=y

CONFIG_MTRR=y

# CONFIG_SMP is not set

# CONFIG_X86_UP_APIC is not set

CONFIG_PM=y

# CONFIG_APM is not set

# ACPI Support

CONFIG_ACPI=y

CONFIG_ACPI_BOOT=y

CONFIG_ACPI_BUS=y

CONFIG_ACPI_EC=y

CONFIG_ACPI_INTERPRETER=y

CONFIG_ACPI_PCI=y

CONFIG_ACPI_POWER=y

CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP=y

CONFIG_ACPI_SYSTEM=y

CONFIG_ACPI_AC=m

CONFIG_ACPI_BATTERY=m

CONFIG_ACPI_BUTTON=m

CONFIG_ACPI_FAN=m

CONFIG_ACPI_PROCESSOR=m

CONFIG_ACPI_THERMAL=m

# CONFIG_ACPI_DEBUG is not set

This is not to say that everyone will have the same results but at least the possibility exist.

Also as a side note with the ACPI patch applied my laptop is experiencing a significant improvement, at least I think its significant, in battery life, I estimate that with APM enabled (the default for RedHat out of the box) that I was getting roughly 25 - 35 minutes from my battery (BP-71). With ACPI I estimate (since I haven't actually tested) I'm getting roughly 40 - 60 minutes from the battery. While not an earth shattering record an improvement none the less. And one more thing these times are not with the system just idle, no these are times with the system online doing email, surfing, etc. YMMV of course.

I must caution though that ACPI isn't for everyone its still in heavy development and changes frequently and there are problems, e.g. attempts to read battery information will cause problems. Other issues include suspend and sleep which I haven't been able to get to work but then again that may just be me and not the fault of the ACPI code.