Acer Aspire One netbook and BL6 Legacy
Aug 17, 2021 21:41:42 GMT
Hippytaff, thewaiter, and 1 more like this
Post by ylee on Aug 17, 2021 21:41:42 GMT
I have an old Acer Aspire One KAV10/AOD150 Netbook which I really haven't used since the BL 2.4 days. I decided to brush the dust off of it and try to install the Bullseye version of BL6.0 on it. This netbook has an Intel Atom N270 32 bit CPU and 1G of memory and had Bodhi linux 2.4 installed up on it.
Upon Booting the ISO I noticed the error msgs below:
It scrolled by fast and the text above came from the syslog after the install. But regardless this was not a great sign as it did not do that with BL1.x or BL2.x. But even worse every 20 or 30 secs the machine would suspend (while it was booting and after it booted in the Live Moksha Desktop.) On that machine you have to press the power button to wake it up from suspend and it would go on with the boot process or whatever else it was doing once booted. Clearly I did NOT want to try to install it with it acting like that
So I killed the ability of systemd to suspend:
That stopped the suspend every 20 seconds thing and I went ahead and installed. Over all the system seemed sluggish ... more on that later. The window for the installer is actually a bit larger than the display of that netbook (resolution 1024x600 and I think the installer needs 800 for height). So I had to move the window around while using the installer to actually be able to click the needed buttons.
Maybe I should see if I can make that window a bit smaller but seriously doubt many users will install on screens that small.
After the install and booting in the installed system I still had the ACPI errors mentioned above as well as a suspend every 20 seconds thing. So once again I ran the command systemctl mask suspend.target which stopped the suspending issue and on rebooting no problems suspending. But the system was still sluggish and htop showed the systemd logind service was using crazy amounts of CPU cycles and that was the sluggishness issue.
I ended up setting "HandleSuspendKey" and "HandleLidSwitch" to ignore in /etc/systemd/logind.conf. This worked like a charm after rebooting. No sluggishness at all.
Now it appears that all this acpi/suspend issues is due to a buggy BIOS on the Acer Aspire One and there are no BIOS updates for that machine on Acers website. In fact, there is nothing about that machine at all on Acers website as far as I can tell. I am also about 87% sure I have the last and latest BIOS update installed on it anyway. One can find BIOS updates for that machine on non-official websites, most I do not trust. But none more recent than the BIOS update i previously installed years ago.
There may be some better fixes of these issues and if I find or figure out any I will post here so it is documented. An older kernel would most likely work without all these fixes but I really would prefer to keep the 5.10 kernel it has installed.
I am posting all this here for other users. I think many users would have problems with these issues and not know what to do.
Upon Booting the ISO I noticed the error msgs below:
acer kernel: [ 2.543832] ACPI: [Firmware Bug]: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored
acer kernel: [ 2.572719] ACPI Error: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, CreateBufferField failure (20200925/dswload2-477)
acer kernel: [ 2.572740] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PCI0._OSC due to previous error (AE_ALREADY_EXISTS) (20200925/psparse-529)It scrolled by fast and the text above came from the syslog after the install. But regardless this was not a great sign as it did not do that with BL1.x or BL2.x. But even worse every 20 or 30 secs the machine would suspend (while it was booting and after it booted in the Live Moksha Desktop.) On that machine you have to press the power button to wake it up from suspend and it would go on with the boot process or whatever else it was doing once booted. Clearly I did NOT want to try to install it with it acting like that
So I killed the ability of systemd to suspend:
sudo systemctl mask suspend.targetThat stopped the suspend every 20 seconds thing and I went ahead and installed. Over all the system seemed sluggish ... more on that later. The window for the installer is actually a bit larger than the display of that netbook (resolution 1024x600 and I think the installer needs 800 for height). So I had to move the window around while using the installer to actually be able to click the needed buttons.
Maybe I should see if I can make that window a bit smaller but seriously doubt many users will install on screens that small.
After the install and booting in the installed system I still had the ACPI errors mentioned above as well as a suspend every 20 seconds thing. So once again I ran the command systemctl mask suspend.target which stopped the suspending issue and on rebooting no problems suspending. But the system was still sluggish and htop showed the systemd logind service was using crazy amounts of CPU cycles and that was the sluggishness issue.
I ended up setting "HandleSuspendKey" and "HandleLidSwitch" to ignore in /etc/systemd/logind.conf. This worked like a charm after rebooting. No sluggishness at all.
Now it appears that all this acpi/suspend issues is due to a buggy BIOS on the Acer Aspire One and there are no BIOS updates for that machine on Acers website. In fact, there is nothing about that machine at all on Acers website as far as I can tell. I am also about 87% sure I have the last and latest BIOS update installed on it anyway. One can find BIOS updates for that machine on non-official websites, most I do not trust. But none more recent than the BIOS update i previously installed years ago.
There may be some better fixes of these issues and if I find or figure out any I will post here so it is documented. An older kernel would most likely work without all these fixes but I really would prefer to keep the 5.10 kernel it has installed.
I am posting all this here for other users. I think many users would have problems with these issues and not know what to do.
