[ale] Why APIC?

[Allan Neal]

I have an NForce mother board with an AMD processor.  When shutting down I
only got the power down message on my screen, but no power down.  I have since
enabled APIC and now it shuts down.  I have not had any stability problems or
performance issues.  I really think it is usefull only on a case by case
basis.  I have heard a lot of people say that it makes their Intel systems
unstable.

Allan

On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 01:33:40PM -0500, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> What is the advantage of APIC that it is typically enabled by default?
> 
> I do a lot of disk i/o intensive work, and I had assumed that using
> the APIC was a good thing for performance, but now I think I'm wrong.
> 
> ===> Why I ask
> 
> I have a machine based on an Intel P4 MB.
> 
> I have used it regularly with SUSE 9.2 for at least a month.
> 
> Yesterday it started complaining in /var/log/warn "Kernel: APIC error
> on CPU0: 60(60)"
> 
> Also the machine became unreliable and locked up a couple of times
> (ie. unresponsive to the keyboard.)
> 
> Based on a quick google search, one thing to try was "noapic" in the grub entry.
> 
> I've done that, and much to my surprise the disk i/o is even faster than before.
> 
> i.e. I just did a md5sum --check and per iostat I was reading 70,000
> 512-byte blocks per second on 2 ide channels simultaneously.
> 
> I don't remember ever getting more than 50,000 or so before.
> 
> Even better, when one of the md5sum --check commands finished, the
> other accelerated to 100,000 blocks per second.
> 
> Thanks
> Greg
> -- 
> Greg Freemyer
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale

-- 
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