[ltp] "Quick Boot"

[Thomas Hood]

On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 02:12, Michelle Klein-Hass wrote:
> One thing you definitely can do is turn off "Quick Boot" from the setup 
> screen. Hold down F1 while turning your ThinkPad on and then keep F1 held 
> down until you get to the setup. "Quick Boot" assumes that Windows is running 
> on the ThinkPad and can interfere with allowing the OS to detect 
> plug-and-play equipment.


Enabling "Quick Boot" switches off the firmware function of configuring
ISA PnP devices before booting the OS.  Switching off this function
saves a wee bit of time and thus makes the power-on sequence a wee
bit quicker.

A genuine "PnP OS" such as Windows doesn't need the firmware to
configure ISA PnP devices because it (the OS) can configure the devices
itself using PnP methods.

GNU/Linux has not one but two implementations of such PnP methods.
The kernel has the isa-pnp driver and userspace has the isapnptools
package.  Unfortunately, last time I checked neither of these was
able to configure the ISA PnP devices on a ThinkPad 600.  I have no
idea why.  I doesn't really matter, though, because the firmware does
a perfectly good job of configuring the devices so long as "Quick Boot"
is disabled.


>  "Quick Boot" is useless under Linux.  It interferes 
> with proper function of sound under Linux, for example.


The reason sound doesn't work if "Quick Boot" is enabled is that when
"Quick Boot" is enabled the firmware leaves the sound chip in an
entirely unconfigured state.

If you have booted with "Quick Boot" enabled then it is still
possible to use firmware routines to configure ISA PnP devices.
You need a kernel with PnPBIOS support, which means either Linux 2.6.x
or an Alan Cox Linux 2.4.x kernel.  With such a kernel you can use
the setpnp command to invoke firmware routines to configure devices.
--
Thomas Hood