Asus motherboards and ACPI

[Josip Loncaric]

Although Linux currently does not care about ACPI and strictly speaking
this problem has virtually zero impact on Beowulf clusters, it may be of
interest to those who use dual boot machines at their desk.

Many popular Asus motherboards, including the P2B-D with PCB revision
1.05 and earlier, have a minor hardware problem when ACPI is used (too
many ACPI events are generated, which can lead to system instability
under ACPI mode Windows 2000).  See these links:

http://france.asus.com/products/techref/Acpi/solution.html
http://www.asus.com/Products/Techref/Acpi/win2000.html

Despite the Asus' optimistic description, this hardware bug frequently
crashes the ACPI mode W2K kernel (however, the APM mode W2K kernel works
fine).  While Asus has a simple fix (move one resistor) this operation
is not to be attempted lightly.  The SMT resistor in question is only
about 1mm long and you need experience and good equipment to do such
precision work.  If you want to install W2K on one of the affected
motherboards but want to avoid hardware rework, be sure to override the
W2K setup (which defaults to ACPI kernel if there is ACPI support in
BIOS) and choose an appropriate non-ACPI kernel at install time (press
F5 when asked for third party SCSI drivers: ask Microsoft for details).

Sincerely,
Josip