Tuesday June 14, 2005
Configuring Solaris ACPI at boot-time
As part of the new Solaris ACPI subsystem integrated as part of Newboot, I've added a new bit to the "acpi-user-options" boot option.
Historically, acpi-user-options=0x2 has been the only publicly documented option, and is used to disable Solaris use of ACPI for CPU enumeration and interrupt routing. Generally speaking, the pattern has historically been to set acpi-user-options=0x2 if there's any problem at all, just to see if the system works better. Changes made in Solaris 10 have made ACPI use in Solaris much more robust, so disabling use of ACPI should not be required as frequently as in previous releases.
Beginning with Newboot, integrated into Solaris source in April (2005), acpi-user-options has changed in a couple of ways:
The previous ACPI subsystem did not put the system into “ACPI” mode, but left the system in “Legacy” mode, where the system BIOS retains control of the system. The new Solaris ACPI subsystem based on ACPI CA now places the system in ACPI mode by default.
acpi-user-options=0x8 causes the new Solaris ACPI subsystem to leave the system in Legacy mode. This is the first option one should try if ACPI-related issues are suspected.
acpi-user-options=0x4 is present in Solaris 10, and causes both the previous Solaris ACPI subsystem and the new subsystem to partially disable use of ACPI – but Hyper-Threaded CPUs are still enumerated using ACPI tables. This is the second option one should use if ACPI-related issues are suspected.
acpi-user-options=0x2 is present in Solaris 10, and causes both the previous Solaris ACPI subsystem and the new subsystem to disable the use of ACPI.
Generally speaking, the new Solaris ACPI subsystem seems to do very well by default. I'll blog separately about some issues I've diagnosed that appeared to be ACPI-related but turned out to be to something else (BIOS issues, actually).
Posted by danasblog [ACPI] ( June 14, 2005 10:21 AM ) Permalink | Comments[8]
Suppose I ought to introduce myself...
I'm Dana Myers, and I'm in the Solaris engineering organization where I spend most of my time leading the Solaris ACPI engineering effort. In my nearly 12 years at Sun, I've been a Solaris x86 engineer, a Consumer/Embedded engineer, a Java Wireless BizDev technologist, and once again a Solaris engineer. While my focus in on providing a high-quality ACPI sub-system based on Intel's excellent ACPI CA interpreter, you might find me tinkering with pretty much any system-board level thing. I still have a soft-spot for network device drivers - perhaps some of you are still using the PCnet-PCI driver in Solaris? I was pleasantly surprised to find a fair bit of the code I wrote at the end of 1994 is still visible in that driver. Coming back to Solaris engineering after a long absence, at a time with so much new energy and new development as we dramatically expand x86 and x64 support, this is such a rush! Just so I don't start thinking it is as good as it gets, I was fortunate to be able to join the Newboot development team - Newboot was my first customer for the new Solaris ACPI subsystem. My ACPI-team colleague David Chieu quickly developed the ISA-device enumeration code on top of the new interpreter, and we're pleased to have filled-in a key piece of Newboot. I'll be blogging a bit about the relatively few, relatively minor issues I've encountered since integrating ACPI CA into Solaris. In general, ACPI CA is working extremely well - the issues we've seen are generally related to how I've changed the way that Solaris interacts with the system. The biggest change is that we run the system in ACPI-mode now, not legacy mode - but I'll save that for another blog. Cheers!Posted by danasblog [General] ( June 14, 2005 09:40 AM ) Permalink | Comments[0]