RE: ACPI + Promise IDE = disk corruption :-(((

[Grover, Andrew]

> From: Alan Cox [mailto:[e-mail]]
> I've seen several people report ACPI eats disks. ACPI is 
> incredibly complex
> badly designed crud. My advice is never use ACPI. This 
> incidentally appears
> to be the advice Microsoft give people too - they tell people 
> to disable
> ACPI as one of the first steps to diagnosing strange crashes 
> in machines

They're just bugs. That's why it's marked experimental, and unlike the rest
of the "experimental" drivers, we aren't kidding.

It's just *one* issue that has generated all the disk corruption reports.
Putting the processor into the C3 power state, in combination with bus
mastering. This is disabled in the most recent release. I'd love to fix this
one, but if it were easy, it'd be fixed by now. Maybe you can shed some
light - if you're willing, let me know and I'll describe the problem in
greater detail.

> I've been discussing with a few folk about doing an 
> alternative mini acpi
> subset so that Linux can be booted on most 'ACPI only' 
> hardware without 
> using all the ACPI junk

Could these discussions be opened up to a wider readership? Perhaps you
could use [e-mail], or
[e-mail]?

Regards -- Andy