Implications of 'acpi=off' for a laptop RHEL 6 install?

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This question is an offshoot of [1]. In summary: brand new laptop [2], purpose is a RHEL 6 mobile development workstation. Using 6.4 install media Anaconda hung on 'Waiting for hardware to initialize'. I was however able to get past this by adding 'acpi=off' to the kernel boot options, which ends up persisting in grub.conf.

I now have everything working - wired and wireless networking, sound, USB, graphics etc. The only issue I can see so far is that Power Management is disabled - so I have no idea as to battery life. That's OK, unless it's a symptom of other issues as yet waiting to be discovered - like cooling system disabled, which I may not notice now, but might surface later in an unpleasant way.

So the question to the community is: has anybody run into this issue before, and have any advice as to how sensible it is to proceed with acpi=off?

[1] (https://access.redhat.com/site/discussions/539573)
[2] (http://www.toshiba.com/us/computers/laptops/qosmio/X70/X75-A7290)

BR
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Stephen Sadowski's picture Active Contributor 135 points
14 November 2013 4:56 PM

It's unlikely you'll have OS support for power management, since that's what you're disabling. Maybe check your BIOS and verify (if you're not using a laptop that's UEFI).

BR Community Member 55 points
15 November 2013 2:29 PM

UPDATE: I was able to remove acpi=off from the kernel boot parameter in grub.conf, provided I added nomodeset. So I now have a fully-functioning RHEL 6 luggable with all Power Management functions.

I'm posting this in case in helps someone else that's spend 3 days trying to unbrick a $2,000 piece of hardware. I have no idea why it works, it was just one of the parameters mentioned on various search results pages. This turns off KMS, which is a 'method for setting display resolution and depth in the kernel space rather than user space', so seemingly completely unrelated to ACPI which is 'an open standard for device configuration and power management by the operating system'.

Accepting my own obvious ignorance, I still feel a gentle rant is in order. I'm a developer, I know a little about computers. I need a professional-grade distribution but I don't build these often enough to get good at it. This is my 5th Red Hat install in a decade (RH7, RHEL3/4/5/6); three were excruciating, two easy as I was able to buy hardware preloaded from Dell. That's what I wanted to do this time, except nobody sells laptops with RHEL 6 preloaded.

Red Hat Support, who grudging took my call even though my subscription is for self-support, told me that the boot hang meant my hardware was incompatible, period. They referred me to hardware.redhat.com for supported systems, of which there are just a handful of 6.4 laptops, none of which had the 17" screen I need.

I think it's quite bad really. If the initial OS loader software hangs, that's a bug. If the solution is the near-random application of kernel options, that's even worse. I appreciate hardware changes all the time, but that just makes even more of a case for some sort of pre-install scanning utility that advises you of possible hardware incompatibility, and possible workarounds (3rd party drivers).

At least I assume I'm not the only person on the planet trying to install the OS on a device smaller than a server.

Akemi Yagi's picture Guru 2404 points
15 November 2013 5:16 PM

Be careful about using nomodeset. According to this RH article:

"Booting with "nomodeset" kernel parameter disables Kernel Mode Setting and display falls back to legacy mode. Using this option disables power management and it usually breaks features like suspend, multihead support, output hotplug, acceleration, etc

Red Hat Engineering does not recommend using this option. This option could be used as a workaround till real bug causing problem is fixed. This option will not be available in RHEL7."

BR Community Member 55 points
16 November 2013 12:34 AM

Thank you this advice. I'm going to run with the system as is for a week or so, see if any problems manifest. Thankfully this laptop is for software development, not playing games. It's giving me native 1920x1080 resolution already. Presumably if I want advanced graphics features I can use NVidia's driver for the card (NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 770M)?

Stephen Sadowski's picture Active Contributor 135 points
15 November 2013 5:28 PM

Bruce: I'm actually running my dev subscription on my Dell M6700, which works like a champ -- I don't know whether it is "supported" but it does have a 17" screen and it took me very little time to get everything up and runnning and I didn't encounter your unfortunate problems. All in all, I've had great success with both Dell E and M series laptops running RHEL/Cent/SL and Fedora.

BR Community Member 55 points
16 November 2013 12:38 AM

Thanks for your comments. It looks like the M6700 is no longer available, the replacement is M6800. With who knows what hardware changes. And neither on the list of Red Hat supported hardware.

Right now I have a working system. As mentioned above I'm going to run with it a week and see that it's stable.

Any future issues - and future installs - I will consider going virtual: run native Windows, use VMWare Workstation for RHEL. Life is just too short.

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