work around needed for broken ACPI on Toshiba Portege 3480CT (CPU runs at minimum speed)

[Ashley Hooper]

I have been running Ubuntu on my Toshiba Portege 3480CT since Dapper days, without problems. I am currently dual-booting Feisty and Gutsy on the laptop, and Feisty has no problems. Although the machine is used as a desktop, I use server mode install, and add my preferred packages for X.org, Xdm, E17, Abiword, Epiphany, Gnumeric etc afterwards.

However, following a recent apt-get upgrade, I experienced extreme slowness in booting, and performance in general. Thinking this might be related to some cruft on the / partition I reformatted it and performed a fresh server install of Ubuntu Gutsy, but the problem persisted exactly as before. I do not use locate/updatedb and even an hour after the machine has booted the problem persists. 'top' does not show any process(es) using significant CPU time.

I thought it was connected with laptop-mode-tools, because multiple laptop_mode processes were showing up in the 'top' process list, using more CPU than I thought they should have been. However I've now upgraded to ubuntu_laptop_mode and performance is still very slow, especially in X.org - moving a basic GTK application window (such as GMPC) around the screen takes CPU to 100% and screen refresh lags terribly.

For example, the Epiphany window takes some 40-60 seconds or more to even appear after clicking the icon, so the problem extends beyond basic display lag. Firefox is even slower. On the other hand, if I boot into Feisty on the same machine, Epiphany starts in 5-10 seconds as normal.

Watching top when the machine is idle, the CPU is ~ 95% idle. Today's upgrade from 2.6.22-10 to -11 did not help with the problem.

The problem seems to be ACPI-related, as disabling ACPI using the acpi=off kernel parameter restores performance. This was unnecessary in Feisty and earlier versions.

[Ashley Hooper (ash-hooper)]

I've just started a Gutsy Netboot install on my other laptop, which is a very similar Toshiba Portege 3490CT and from the start the text mode installer ran at an appalling speed; when the screen was cleared and a new page displayed the update could be seen proceeding line by line.

Adding acpi=off to the netboot kernel parameters fixed the performance, but of course disabled ACPI support.
This is not ideal as Suspend and several other power-related features do not work with APM support out of box, but have worked with ACPI on Feisty and earlier releases.

[cprise (cprise-yahoo)]

http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php?t=30223

See the above thread for details on a bad acpid-CPU throttling problem found in Knoppix and Xandros. With acpi left on, check the scaling_governor mode and also the threshold, and see if the tips at the above link help you any (and of course, report back here). In particular, instead of using the 'performance' setting, you may want to set the threshold to a low value like '20' (worked well for me); A high threshold will kill system responsiveness when the CPU is doing light duty.

[Ashley Hooper (ash-hooper)]

My laptop has a Pentium III 600 (Coppermine) CPU, and none of the various CPU frequency/scaling kernel modules are loadable. This means that the subdirectories under /sys for controlling throttling etc are non-existent.

With ACPI enabled, the kernel seems to run slowly right from the start. When I use 'acpi=off' the system boots at normal speed.

[Ashley Hooper (ash-hooper)]

After compiling and installing 'vanilla' kernel 2.6.23.1, my machine runs at full speed again and also suspend to disk & RAM both work. I will just hope that the Ubuntu kernel devs are able to ix this sometime in the Gutsy lifecycle.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Can people with this laptop and affected by the issue, please post the output from:

  cat /var/lib/acpi-support/*-*

and:

  cat /proc/cpuinfo

and:

  find /sys/ -name \*freq\* -o -name \*trans\*| xargs sudo grep .

(including the final '.').

[Thomas Matysik (paradon)]

  cat /var/lib/acpi-support/*-*

Version 1.40
TOSHIBA
PORTEGE3480
PP348A-4PU82

  cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 600.066
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat p
se36 mmx fxsr sse up
bogomips : 1201.16
clflush size : 32

  find /sys/ -name \*freq\* -o -name \*trans\*| xargs sudo grep .

Gives no output at all. (In fact there are no files, only directories, matching that find command).

[Francisco de Assis Prates (mad-kanie)]

my laptop is not the same you pointed, paul, but I'm affected by the issue. my ubuntu is running on a 2.6.23 kernel, with acpi=on. (unfortunately, the official ubuntu kernel doesn't work for me : ( ):

cat /var/lib/acpi-support/*-*
V1.03A.BZKB

cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.60GHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 600.000
cache size : 2048 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe bts est tm2
bogomips : 1197.78
clflush size : 64

find /sys/ -name \*freq\* -o -name \*trans\*| xargs sudo grep .
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/stats/total_trans:560
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq:600000
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies:1600000 1400000 1200000 1000000 800000 600000
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq:1600000
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq:600000
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_max_freq:1600000
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_min_freq:600000

my ubuntu is running on a 2.6.23 kernel, with acpi=on.

[Ashley Hooper (ash-hooper)]

Here's the results from my Portege 3480CT:

  cat /var/lib/acpi-support/*-*

Version 1.40
TOSHIBA
P3480
Version 1.0

and:

  cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 600.039
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse up
bogomips : 1201.16
clflush size : 32

and:

  find /sys/ -name \*freq\* -o -name \*trans\*| xargs sudo grep .

(including the final '.').

No output from the above command.

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

Thanks for providing debugging info.

[Marcin Depinski (depinski)]

Linux marcin-z1 2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 22:56:21 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
(Ubuntu 8.04)
Actual CPU is Coppermine 700Mhz with speedstep. System doesn't load any governor modules.

Version 1.90
Invalid entry length (0). DMI table is broken! Stop.

TOSHIBA
Invalid entry length (0). DMI table is broken! Stop.

PORTEGE 3490CT
Invalid entry length (0). DMI table is broken! Stop.

PP349U-6PY838GC
Invalid entry length (0). DMI table is broken! Stop.

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 369.099
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse up
bogomips : 709.94
clflush size : 32

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Per a decision made by the Ubuntu Kernel Team, bugs will longer be assigned to the ubuntu-kernel-team in Launchpad as part of the bug triage process. The ubuntu-kernel-team is being unassigned from this bug report. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeamBugPolicies for more information. Thanks.

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Ashley Hooper (ash-hooper)]

This has been fixed for a long time. Sorry for not updating the ticket sooner!

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

Thanks. Closing here then.