Will Standard PC instead of ACPI help raid?

[acheyenne]

My raid 0 performance on A7V266-E with on-board Promise (half of what it should be) is still bugging me. Only thing left to try is to isolate the Promise to its own IRQ by changing ACPI to Standard PC and reinstalling drivers.

Does anybody think it's worth the hassle of trying this? Could poor raid performance be due to it sharing an IRQ with a half-dozen other devices, or is this just pissing in the wind?

[FrodgE]

pissing in the wind


My opinion anyway. Changing ACPI to be a standard PC is a pretty stupid idea I think. I won't fix any problems, if anything it'll create them. ACPI is not the source of problems, yes it also allows the sharing of interupts.... that's the whole point ! It was designed largely for this reason and so it does a good job. If you are experiancing problems then it's something else that's responsible, not ACPI. Fix that problem rather than messing around other stuff.

Sorry, this rant ain't aimed at you in particular. It just seems that everyone wants to disable a really nice feature. In the days before windows supported ACPI it was a pretty good idea to try and ensure that there was no sharing. Now windows does fully support it so it's only old isa devices that require a unique irq, and they will be given it.


Oh how I get side tracked.... From memory you asked a question ! Well I don't have raid on my board (wasn't paying attention when I bought it) so this may not apply, I don't know. But, are there any drivers for the raid that could be / should be installed ?


I've written way too much !

[sKuLLsHoT]

bs man, disabling ACPI as part of an install should almost be a biblical habit, I have found the number of problems it has fixed in the past far outweighs the "bonus' " of ACPI

IRQs were never designed to be shared, so regardless of what is happening, ACPI does allow more things to use one IRQ, but it is a drawback on system performance for people on systems with a few or many peripherals.

that being said, more systems today, the newer ones, are actually giving me grief when i disable acpi, so it seems that hardware compatibility is finally kicking into line with the whole acpi concept, however all installs i do atm wil have acpi disabled to start with....any troubles - BAM i try it as acpi, still trouble - BAM - i go back again and sort it out in std PC mode..

furthermore, and relating to the problem at hand, i think it will do little to resolve your performance issues mainly because A. its an onboard controller, and B. most onboard devices are grouped and share IRQs like that forced by the mainboard, and so no matter whether its standard PC or not, the IRQs will still be together....

[acheyenne]

So my next question is, has ANYBODY gotten good on-board raid 0 performance on an A7V266-E? I'm more than happy to go buy a pci Promise controller if that will do the trick.

[FrodgE]

Yeah I hear what you're saying but I have to disagree, to an extent. Yes I agree that it's only newer hardware and software that really complies with the ACPI standard. Older systems can't handle irq sharing. I'm aware that irq aren't supposed to be shared and I'm not sure how the ACPI spec changes the isr table, but that's not the point. Older devices that can't handle it are automatically given seperate irq and those that can handle it share.

Not long ago I had problems with my sound quality. My GeForce and my Creative sound card (and other stuff) were sharing an IRQ. I read many things claiming that if I used the standard pc setup as opposed to ACPI then my problems would be fixed. I tried it and had the exact same problem, nothing had changed and I lost all my power management features too. Hoorah, why bother ? In the end my problems were solved when I got a new motherboard.

I'm yet to come across a situation where disabling ACPI has been beneficial.


Sorry acheyenne this is off topic, I dunno about your raid question.