New AMD64 owner

[James Van Artsdalen]

> From: "Haapanen, Tom" <tomh at waterloo.equitrac.com>
> Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 08:45:11 -0500
> 
> Is there any real downside in turning off ACPI?  Especially for a server
> that will be running 24x7?

If it seems to work then turning off ACPI has no important downside.

"Seems to work" means that you can access a disk drive or talk over a
network: I don't expect any subtle failure modes.

My familiarity with this is from the BIOS side, and about five years
old, but I think FreeBSD can get all of the data it needs to configure
the IRQ/IOAPIC from the MP tables.  ACPI probably isn't required.

The bigger question is whether the MP table data is reliable.  I
believe Windows uses ACPI exclusively if available, so once BIOS
vendor X has ACPI everything else becomes untested and unreliable.

(vendors generally don't test anything the current version of Windows
doesn't use, so ACPI in FreeBSD is preferred even if theoretically
unnecessary).

I see no reason not to deploy a FreeBSD/AMD64 server right now, after
the hardware is burned in, and if all of the apps run 64-bit.