win2000 and acpi irq sharing

[Cephas]

Ive just got win2000 working. Everythings nice apart from the way win2000 went and forced every PCI card in my machine onto irq 11.
From reading the info on the microsoft site, it seems the only way they recommend to stop this is to re-install win2000 with acpi turned off in the bios. Doing this is going to be a real pain, so i was wondering if anybody new of a way to re-assign irq without having to re-install?
Ive got an ABIT BF6 MB btw.

 

[AndyHui]

Go into device manager, click on Computer. It should say Advanced Configuration Power Interface PC. Change the 'driver' for this to Standard PC and reboot. That should switch the HAL back to standard mode and let you reassign IRQs.

 

[MihalyKertesz]

I'm unable to understand why people get so upset when W2K assigns everything to one IRQ. As long as everything works, what is the problem?? I'm planning to upgrade to W2K soon & it will not bother me if that happens. The OS I'm using now(WIN98 FE)puts my Creative GeForce card & SB Live sound card on the same IRQ(it has been said quite often that this sort of sharing should be AVOIDED at all costs) and both work perfectly.

 

[Cephas]

As i understand it you take a performance hit on the devices that are sharing irq's.
irq's are there to allow the BIOS/OS to determine which device needs attention. When a single devices is on an irq, it can be determined in one step which device it is, but when you've got 5 devices on the same irq a secondary method of sorting the mess out is needed, and this, in theory is where the slow down comes from.

Anybody have more info?

 

[Nessism]

Maybe I am stupid or something but I think that the IRQ sharing business in Win2k caused my system to corrupt my hard drive. Several times when multitasking, such as playing a CD while surfing the internet while trying to do something else, my system would freeze up and stop responding. After resetting, I would get an error message stating "no IDE hard drive installed". To repair I had to power off completly and wait for 30sec or so and then reboot. On about the third time of this bs the system would not come back, somehow my hard drive partion was gone.
Like I said, maybe I'm stupid but I think that the system wigged out when I did so much stuff at once forcing the OS to try to route all thoes interupt commands. Anyone have a better explanation?

 

[dBait]

Like U said Cephas.
The irq-sharing will slow down performance. B'cause when f.i your sondblaster waits for an Interrupt, it will have to line up and wait for its turn. When U assign an irq to ONE device, it will not have to wait.
It's espesially bad to have your graphics card to share irq, and then again worse if it's with youre soundcard. Both of these card takes a lot of resourses, and the performance will drop.

btw.
I've got the same problem as Cephas.
I dualboot win2k and win98(se).
My win98 installation is a real pain, and freezez my computer every 5 min.
The IRQ is however assigned different in '98 than in '2k.
I thougt that BIOS controlled the IRQ assignment. I've tried to configure IRQ's manually in BIOS, but '2k ignores my changes.

and two questions
What is HAL and ACPI
What do the do?

 

[AndyHui]

HAL is the Hardware Abstraction Layer. It's the layer of software in the OS that talks directly to the hardware. Because of WinNT/2K's structure, the HAL and the executive services are very important to the functioning of the OS. Everything that goes on in WinNT/2K must go through the HAL.

ACPI is Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. Basically, it's a form of Advanced Power Management (APM). It not only controls power savings, but also controls and assigns system resources as well.

 

[ericd]

I don't have any problems with devices sharing IRQ's untill there are 7 yes count them 7 devices in my machine sharing IRQ 11. I could be crazy but I blame this for the EXTREME instabillity that I experience in Win2K. Just in case you are curious those 7 devices include :

Video Card
Sound Card
Network Card
2 SCSI Cards
and 2 USB controllers

now if that isn't too much for one IRQ to handle I am very impressed with the engineers who managed that one.

Eric

 

[Floyd]

I think there is a lot of misinformation being spread around about IRQ sharing, part of the problem being that there is apparently no definitive technical paper available (that I can find, anyway). I recently experienced severe problems in Win2k which I believed to be related to IRQ sharing. In fact, the resource allocation was almost exactly the same as that of the gentleman above. After failing to resolve the problem after more than two weeks of sustained troubleshooting (I'm a glutton for punishment), I reinstalled with the Standard PC HAL. Turns out that IRQ sharing was not the cause of this specific problem, however, it has increased the overall responsiveness of the system and stability (used to receive occasional stop errors & reboot, specifying an "IRQ not less than or equal to" or something to that effect). Additionally, it fixed an audio distortion that occurred when dragging windows or scrolling.

I won't be so pretentious as to suggest that IRQ sharing doesn't work. I think the qualifier is that it will work assuming all conditions are [essentially] perfect. Of course, they seldom are, and the same is true of legacy configurations. However, at this point, I can see no redeeming qualities that would compel someone to use ACPI/IRQ sharing assuming the user is capable of assigning resources manually. There's nothing magical about IRQ sharing that makes a system any more stable or responsive, and I would genuinely appreciate a correction if I am wrong. As with any technology, it will mature with time, both in its implementation and hardware/driver support from manufacturers.

Until such time has clearly arrived, I will stay with a configuration for which I have the tools, knowledge, and experience to troubleshoot. If you have read this far, thank you for your time

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[NFS4]

Abit KA7 + Win2k

9 Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System
11 NVIDIA GeForce 256
11 VIA USB Universal Host Controller
11 VIA USB Universal Host Controller
11 Creative SB Live! (WDM)
11 Hauppauge Win/TV 878/9 VFW Video Driver
11 NETGEAR FA310TX Fast Ethernet Adapter (NGRPCI)
11 Conexant SoftK56 PCI Modem(M)
14 Primary IDE Channel
15 Secondary IDE Channel
12 Hauppauge Win/TV 878/9 VFW Audio Driver
8 System CMOS/real time clock
13 Numeric data processor
6 Standard floppy disk controller
4 Communications Port (COM1)
3 Communications Port (COM2)
1 Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard

NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER!!!

 

[TomBilliodeaux]

From Superbaby's comments in W2K tweeks post 9/25/00:
You can get more information here on how to hack your way into changing IRQ's:

http://www.geforcefaq.com/#hw:gef:troub:all1irqw2k

But beware! I tried all these procedures and ended up with a very very corrupted copy of Win2k that wouldn't boot. I recommend not trying them. I lost a lot of data because of this =(

 

[Dulanic]

NFS maybe you dont have a problem, but benchmark your system in Quake 3 with and without all that sharing. I gained 21FPS after I got rid of ACPI. And that was in 1024x768 32-bit.... thats alot. Oh and it also fixed my SB Live distortion.

 

[NFS4]

I don't play Quake 3 or many games at all.

Benchmarking means nothing to me b/c as long as I can play a game at constant frames, I don't give a rats ass about the #

 

[Spoooon]

I noticed an improvement in both my sound card and my video card. When I would play Quake III, the sound would crackle or not play. After I changed it from ACPI to Standard PC, I gained 10fps and the sound no longer crackled. However, the sound thing could have just been the sound card. Which Guillemot said was supported by Win2000. What they didn't say was that certain features, like the rear channels, didn't work in Win2000. So, I took the darned thing back and got a SBLive. Also, Guillemot doesn't even list the soundcard that I had on their web site!

 

[Cephas]

Well I tried ripping the ACPI drivers out and replacing them with the HAL drivers.
It almost worked, but the beta vortex drivers i was using screwed up.
So i got a shiny new SB Live and re-installed win2k.
With everything spread out on different IRQ's the system seems faster in games, but thats just a feeling, I did no benchmarking.
I think the sharing would work fine if you have a few devices that don't require constant interupts on the same IRQ, but its hard to believe that having a 3d card, sound IDE raid and network all on the same IRQ is a good thing.

 

[Caliber]

im about to reinstall win2k, what steps do i need to do in order to install with ACPI disabled?
(i tried doing it when i had win2k installed but it ended up corrupting my hdd, hopefully disabling it at install will be more problem free)

 

[Floyd]

If you hit F5 as the message "Press F6 to install additional drivers" appears at the bottom, it will soon pop up a dialog where you can select your PC type. Or you can simply hit F7 when the message appears and it will silently change the installation mode to Standard PC (silently->you won't receive confirmation).

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[Caliber]

Well, i got everything set up, i enabled APM in power properties, but when i goto shutdown everything makes the usual "winding down" sound of the hdd's turning off, but then all a sudden the pc goes back on all by itself!

 

[Supergax]

Caliber, I had this happen when I changed from ACPI to standard PC. I had to reformat to stop this. Don't know why. The reason I changed it was due to choppiness of everything, even just in simple takes like checking email, my sound would be choppy while browsing the web, my mouse would go choppy during a lot of hard drive access, etc. After changing to standard pc, and turning on power management controlled by apm in my bios, things are working smoothly.

 

[Magic30]

I just built my new KT7 Raid / Duron 700 system with Win2k Pro and Win98 SE. I installed Win2k without ACPI and the sytstem is very stable (soundcard, network card and USB controllers on IRQ 10) (only the HPT370 on IRQ 11).

My old PC (PII-400 with 224 Mb RAM, Win2kPro with ACPI, DVD Player, NIC, Geforce DDR, ISA Soundcard, Intel SE440BX) also was very stable although I had ACPI activated: I had the PII-400 24 hours the day powered on, worked with it the half day and was used to running SETI at night... this system worked fine for 3 months(!!) without a single crash. OK, sometimes I rebooted to play an old game under the Win 98 installation on the other partition but 95% of the time Win2k was on.

 

[Caliber]

Well, I enabled Standard PC in the setup procedure, i didnt change from ACPI to standard PC after i installed win2k since it was already set to Standard PC