Evening all,
Finally got around to working out why my laptop always seems to run like a dog, apparently the CPU was being permanently throttled back to 800MHz (even on AC), even though it's a 2.2GHz (Athlon 64 3400) processor. Managed to get it play at full speed by renabling ACPI on boot - which reminded me why I turned ACPI off in the first place - for some reason pretty much the whole USB system doesn't work with it on!

Anyone have similar experiences/solutions/ideas?

Distro - Gentoo (although same behaviour with Mandriva LE2005)
Kernel - 2.6.13-ck8 (although same behaviour with 2.6.12 gentoo sources)
Symptoms - with ACPI turned on, usb devices which draw power (ie. my mouse) power up, but so date seems to come through (via cat /dev/psaux, or any other likely candidate), can't print via USB printer, or sync palm - so I'm willing to say that USB doesn't work with ACPI on.

Solutions sought - either (and ideally) a way to make USB work with ACPI turned on, or alternatively a method to force the CPU to always use performance mode and stay clocked at 2.20GHz without acpi.

User - still relative newbie (just under a year on Linux) - so no long words please ;-)
Checked - many (far too many!) hours on google and man pages, not finding that many people with same prob, and no solutions although something that looked hopeful was passing 'acpi_user_option=<n>' to the kernel on boot, although don't know what it does, someone had similar probs said it worked (didn't for me though).

Thanks in advance for any help,
Ryan


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Solution
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Right after many more hours of tinkering when i should have been working, I've successfully solved the mysterious of missing USB facilities.

Fault was caused by an outdated BIOS (F30) upgrading to F33 (has to be done in windows I'm afraid) will fix the problem. Shame it wasn't something more interesting ;-)

Here's the link for the page with the AMD varient bios updates (intel ones available from compaq.com and navigating) : R3000 bios updates

(keywords for search engines for people with same problem) - acpi, r3000, presario, f30, usb not working, acpi breaks usb, usb devices hidden, ohci_hcd usb takeover failed

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Cheers,
Ryan

I've got this USB problem too. I know the real solution is to upgrade the BIOS but without Windows this will take a bit of time (make a DOS boot CD etc) so I'm using a temporary solution which is to load the ohci_hcd module with the option "no_handshake=1". I guess that it can be put in as a kernel boot parameter but I've not figured it out yet. Just goes to show how lazy I am.

Yeah, it's a pain isn't it - I guess this is one good thing to come out of C&C Generals not being ported to Linux, as that's the only reason I keep the XP installation ;-)

I've written to Compaq about the possibility of Linux version (of the bios installer) - although no reply yet - are there many people in the same situation, if we all continue to mail them perhaps they'll get the hint one day ;-)

Ryan

Dude man, YOU ROCK
I could not get my USB ports to work under SUSE 10.0 on my Presario R3000. I did a BIOS update like you said and BAM all works.

Thanks Dude