Anything else I need to disable or enable when using Linux RH?

[onesandzeros]

I read on a few forums that disabling PnP is needed. Is there a reason for this? Anything else I should disable or enable to make Linux RH run its best?

[DMR]

Disabling BIOS PNP is recommended because it often causes hardware resource (IRQ, I/O) conflicts under Linux. There are other options which you might need to specify in order to disable/bypass certain things, but that depends entire on your specific hardware, especially your motherboard and processor.

Some of those options are:

noapic
noacpi
nodma
noathlon
nopentium

There are documents on Redhat's support site which describe the function of each of these options.

[mim]

Originally posted by DMR
Disabling BIOS PNP is recommended because it often causes hardware resource (IRQ, I/O) conflicts under Linux. There are other options which you might need to specify in order to disable/bypass certain things, but that depends entire on your specific hardware, especially your motherboard and processor.

Some of those options are:

noapic
noacpi
nodma
noathlon
nopentium

There are documents on Redhat's support site which describe the function of each of these options.

DMR -- Is disabling PnP recommended only before installing Linux or is this something that should be kept off indefinately? The reason i ask this is because i intend to dual-boot with RH9 and XP, and we all know how XP loves it's PnP.

[DMR]

You should disable it before the install and leave it off after that. I know from experience that both Win98 and Win2k work perfectly with BIOS PNP disabled; XP shouldn't be very different.

Remember that disbling BIOS PNP doesn't mean that you're disabling PNP entirely; the operating system's built-in PNP functionality should handle anything that the BIOS doesn't deal with.

[scott_R]

A lot of people get confused on this issue. PnP stands for plug and play, and why wouldn't you want that, right? Well, in reality, PnP is for old (E)ISA style cards. (Those are the black slots you see in old 486's and Pentium I & II's.)

PCI has it's own form of pnp. What the OS wants to do, ideally, is to copy the information about your cards from the bios to itself, then control them itself. This is mostly for speed, as the bios tends to be a fairly slow, limited capability chip compared to the rest of your system. Windows automatically does this, but linux gives you the option of using it if you have older hardware. Like the previous post stated, if PnP is enabled, and you don't need it, the bios will do strange things as it fights with your OS for control of the interrupts and so on.

If your system is any newer than 1998, you'll probably want PnP disabled. If it isn't, a quick look inside should clear it up for you. One thing to remember is that some really old hardware is hard-wired for certain IRQ's, but that's mostly an issue for people that are into antiques. :)