CentOS - Feb 2008 - ACPI reboot-issue (CentOS 4)

Hi all,

I'm trying to troubleshoot my way thru a ACPI-issue on several machines 
with the Asus P5N32-E SLI motherboard (S775, Nvidia 680i chipset)
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=397&l4=0&model=1459&modelmenu=1

This is CentOS 4 x86_64, and appears on all tested kernels, including 
kernel-smp-2.6.9-67.0.4.EL

My symptoms are that the machine won't reboot on the reboot command. 
'poweroff' does turn the power off and halt halts the system (without 
turning the power off), but reboot effectively does a 'halt'.

I can 'fix' this by giving the 'acpi=off' parameter to the
kernel in
grub, but this causes other problems (some of these machines have 
quad-core CPUs, and these require ACPI to initialize 3 of the cores. The 
dual-core CPU-machines work with acpi=off.

With acpi=off, reboot works as it is supposed to.

I think the root of this issue is the Asus BIOS - we also have several 
Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe (Athlon64, Nvidia 570 chipset) systems that started 
exhibiting the same symptom after a BIOS upgrade. On these acpi=off does 
not cause other problems, so this is no issue for us now.

Any suggestions? I think I understand that turning ACPI off basically 
turns APM on, and that APM reboot works. Is there a way to do reboot 
with APM instead of ACPI?

Yours,
-S
-- 
Simen Thoresen - Dolphin ICS Systems Administrator

Simen Thoresen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying to troubleshoot my way thru a ACPI-issue on several 
> machines with the Asus P5N32-E SLI motherboard (S775, Nvidia 680i 
> chipset)
>
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=397&l4=0&model=1459&modelmenu=1
>
>
> This is CentOS 4 x86_64, and appears on all tested kernels, including 
> kernel-smp-2.6.9-67.0.4.EL
>
> My symptoms are that the machine won't reboot on the reboot command. 
> 'poweroff' does turn the power off and halt halts the system
(without
> turning the power off), but reboot effectively does a 'halt'.
>
> I can 'fix' this by giving the 'acpi=off' parameter to the
kernel in
> grub, but this causes other problems (some of these machines have 
> quad-core CPUs, and these require ACPI to initialize 3 of the cores. 
> The dual-core CPU-machines work with acpi=off.
>
> With acpi=off, reboot works as it is supposed to.
>
> I think the root of this issue is the Asus BIOS - we also have several 
> Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe (Athlon64, Nvidia 570 chipset) systems that 
> started exhibiting the same symptom after a BIOS upgrade. On these 
> acpi=off does not cause other problems, so this is no issue for us now.
>
> Any suggestions? I think I understand that turning ACPI off basically 
> turns APM on, and that APM reboot works. Is there a way to do reboot 
> with APM instead of ACPI?
>
> Yours,
> -S
What does "poweroff now -r" do?

-- 

Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
CEO, SoftDux

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