When I use the acpi4linux USE flag with the gentoo-sources kernel I have real performance issues. After fighting with it for a while I believe that I have tracked down the problem. It appears that the version of the acpi patch applied to the gentoo-sources kernel does not play nice with my hardware. As soon as the machine boots the acpi driver throttles the CPU back to either 50% or 62% idle. I tried echoing other values into /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling, but any changes made by doing so only last for a few seconds before the driver throttles my system back down again. This happens even when the processor module is not loaded... After struggling with this for a few days I finally started over with a clean 2.4.21.pre6 kernel from kernel.org and the latest acpi patches. Since then everything seems to be behaving MUCH better, but I would love to be able to use the gentoo-sources kernel rather than managing my own custom kernel...
try gentoo-sources-2.4.20-r3 it has a much updated acpi. Thanks, Jay
Nope... It still tries to throttle my CPU back to 50%... From looking at the code it looks like the acpi has been updated to version 20021122. Apparently the fix for this issue was not introduced until somewhere between versions 20021122 and 20030321 (which I am currently running just fine).
as it stands now, there won't be an updated acpi until 2.4.21 on gentoo-sources. Jay
