HOWTO disable acpi

From PFSenseDocs

Jump to: navigation, search
This article is part of the HOWTO series.

Contents

Summary

This article is meant to show you how you can effectivley disable ACPI. Take note that this method is "semi-permanent" in that you will probably need to change it back to being disabled if and/or when you ugprade.

Information

There have been 2 main reports floating around the forums, mailing list, and IRC as to why you might want to disable ACPI.

calcru Errors

Calcru messages are typically harmless, though they can get quite annoying because they can fill up logs very fast. I am running an IBM eServer x330 which has a 2 x P3 processors, 256MB RAM, and a 36GB U160 SCSI drive in it. It also has 4 Intel (fxp) NICs in it that I use for connectivity. On a default install of pfSense 1.2-BETA, I was getting excessive calcru messages that looked like this:

calcru: negative runtime of -350418 usec for bufdaemon

To alleviate the problem, I added the following line to /boot/device.hints at the very bottom:

hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"

After rebooting, this immediately resolved my calcru messages, and I have not had any problems since. I also have not noticed any performance impacts either.

Long Boot

This issue came by way of the mailing list. The admin reported that on an IBM X335 with INtel Xeon 2.8ghz and 2.5 GB of RAM), it would take the system upwards of 6 minutes to get fully booted with pfSense 1.0.1. The majority of the time was spent at the following message:

smp: AP CPU #1 Launched!

After trying to boot his 1.0.1 box with ACPI disabled (via the FreeBSD boot menu), it came up in under a minute. To semi-permanently disable ACPI, they should make the same change mentioned above. Modify /boot/device.hints, and add this entry at the very bottom:

hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"

Caveats

We aren't currently aware of any caveats (performance or otherwise) when disabling ACPI, if you know of any, drop us a line.

Personal tools