Any reason to leave ACPI enabled in a guest?

Discussions about using Windows guests in VirtualBox.
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rgesswein
Posts: 8
Joined: 13. Jul 2007, 15:37

Any reason to leave ACPI enabled in a guest?

Post by rgesswein »

I've been getting messages popping up in the guest telling me my battery was low even though the laptop was running on AC. Also when running a guest I would have occasional problems with my screen blanking and not being able to get it to come back to life. When searching the web for information about the latter I ran across ACPI posts. I've disabled ACPI on my guest machines (using these steps) and my problems seem to have gone away. Turning off ACPI doesn't seem to impact performance or operation on my guests.

Does anyone know if VirtualBox wants or needs ACPI to be enabled on a guest?

Thanks -- Robert
sandervl
Volunteer
Posts: 1064
Joined: 10. May 2007, 10:27
Primary OS: MS Windows Vista
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows, Linux, Solaris

Post by sandervl »

No, but you have to keep in mind that if you install Windows with ACPI enabled, you must not turn it off later on. Otherwise windows will no longer boot.

Perhaps there's a problem with the way we determine the battery level. I assume you're running Linux as a host? If so, please tell us which distribution/version.
rgesswein
Posts: 8
Joined: 13. Jul 2007, 15:37

Post by rgesswein »

I'm running Windows XP host and Windows XP guest on a ThinkPad T60p laptop these were clean installs as of two weeks ago and I've been testing various configurations to see how things work.

Interesting though, I did turn the ACPI off after having installed with it enabled. I got a bunch of messages that I needed driver changes, but everything booted properly afterwards on two separate test guest configurations.
PGHammer
Posts: 23
Joined: 2. Dec 2007, 11:30

Windows and ACPI

Post by PGHammer »

rgesswein wrote:I'm running Windows XP host and Windows XP guest on a ThinkPad T60p laptop these were clean installs as of two weeks ago and I've been testing various configurations to see how things work.

Interesting though, I did turn the ACPI off after having installed with it enabled. I got a bunch of messages that I needed driver changes, but everything booted properly afterwards on two separate test guest configurations.
ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), while best known in portable computers, came as part of the same package that gave us PCI and the Pentium; Windows 95 and NT 4 Workstation were the first Microsoft operating environments to explicitly support ACPI. Most *desktop* motherboards, especially recent ones, work just fine with ACPI enabled in the BIOS (which is why VirtualBox enables it by default). Windows NT 4 and later all support ACPI, so leaving it enabled shouldn't hurt Windows guests; same applies to Linux guests with 2.4 and later kernels.
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