In the past, I used a Tyan MP2466 dual-processor motherboard and noticed something odd about it over the years. I had instability problems where it locks up so that only cycling the power switch will restore it to function. It seemed related to video and USB devices and IRQ's, but maybe not. I've also dual-booted to WinXP to play some of my games that won't run in Linux and noticed that I never had the same instability problems with WinXP on the very same hardware. All that seems over now. A kernel command line option, acpi_os= , will spoof the Operating System to the BIOS. The available choices are found in uteval.c in the kernel source. If using a Microsoft OS, any value prior to Windows7 returns the value for Windows7. Here is the current list : "Microsoft Windows" will spoof for Windows98 "Windows 2000", /* Windows 2000 */ "Windows 2001", /* Windows XP */ "Windows 2001 SP1", /* Windows XP SP1 */ ...
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