Hello everyone,
acpi=off was added to the Diskless default boot, during the early days of Pluto 2.0, because of hardware that contained faulty DSDT tables, which did not properly initialize the I/O controller hardware. Since the BIOS in these early machines (circa 2004-2007) initialized the I/O controllers and embedded hardware to a point where the linux kernel could work around the bugs, it was a way to get the non-working machines to boot properly.
With the decreased use of legacy BIOS in the x86 world, and the emphasis on decreasing POST and boot times, firmware engineers moved the initialization of critical I/O subsystems to the operating system, utilizing ACPI to discover, enumerate, and provide the needed data to bring up the I/O controllers and other embedded devices. If ACPI is not turned on, these devices are typically in a non-working state, causing devices to not be discovered, to kernel panics while the kernel brings itself up.
It would be beneficial to hear from everyone, as to the effects of turning this attribute on or off while booting the diskless workstation, does it stop kernel panics? do the NICs initialize properly?
There is a ticket open for this issue:
https://git.linuxmce.org/linuxmce/linuxmce/issues/2731Please let us know,
-Thom
