Have you tried booting with acpi=off?

Post #308,840 by scoenye 5/17/09 9:46:13 PM Reply	Have you tried booting with acpi=off? You'll lose power management, deck lid switch, etc. but this should isolate any related issues that can cause the slowdown and CPU grab. There are some flaky things going on with ACPI in the recent kernel releases. Among other things, excessive timer interrupts can eat the CPU, which would not show in the process list. I've been digging into this for the last few weeks because Debian Lenny is very hard to get going on my work HP 6515b with ACPI enabled (both x86 and amd64 flavors). I finally got things halfway stable booting with pci=noacpi. I suspect the wireless issue may also be kernel related. So far, I've been unable to get any wireless going on the 6515b (includes the onboard Broadcom 4311, an Atheros Cardbus card, and a stone age ADM8211 802.11b only card and using all drivers I could get my hands on.) The drivers load, but an occasional spurt of time-out errors in the dmesg log is all that happens.
Post #308,841 by Another Scott 5/17/09 9:56:08 PM Reply	Very interesting. No, I haven't tried the ACPI switch yet. I'll see if I can do that when I return to it more intensively. I haven't depended on the power management stuff working in any of my Linux installs - I just leave the intensity turned down with the lid propped open, and stand it up on its leading edge, propped up out of the way... :-/ I suspect you're right on several counts, but the system is much better with the default Gnome install. I noticed in my brief poking around that Gnome has many of the fancy GUI enhancements turned off, while I think a lot of them were turned on with KDE 4.x. I don't know enough about either of them to do much tuning yet.... The wireless still seems a little flaky, taking several minutes to connect to my WAP, and DNSes seem to be lost for no apparent reason for a minute at a time, but it is working. Thanks very much for your comments, especially on the Debian caveats. Given all of that, and since the T41 is mainly just for playing around during commercials while I watch TV, I'll look around a little but won't assume that simply a new Linux distro install will fix it. I'll probably just live with it until I have a more pressing need. I'll report back if I find out anything more that might be useful to you or others. Thanks again. Cheers, Scott.
Post #308,844 by drook 5/17/09 11:33:47 PM Reply	Have to do that to get the CD/DVD player to work So I can have the lid switch work and have it shut down correctly, or I can play/burn optical media, but not both at the same time. -- Drew

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