APIC?

[Tamerz]

Ok I've looked this up and tried to understand it but I'm still lost. What is the point of this? When I enable it in my kernel I have nothing but problems. What am I missing out by removing it? From what I found my CPU supports it (Athlon 64 FX-51) and the help in menuconfig says it shouldn't hurt anything to enable it if you don't.

[setagllib]

I was once answering this question in a NetBSD mailing list, and this more in-the-know fellow responded with an even more useful post:

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2004/11/10/0006.html

That's just about it. There are potential performance advantages to having the APIC do the dirty work.

I would enable ACPI for the same reasons, if for some reason you have it disabled now. ACPI and APICs work hand-in-hand.
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My other computer is your Windows box.

[Hyper_Eye]

I had a problem with games dropping FPS every 5 seconds or so. The time in between drops seemed pretty constant so the first thing I looked at was interrupts. I saw that my video card was sharing an interrupt with my SATA controller which is running RAID0. I enabled APIC and *poof*... the problem was gone. Of course I was aware of what APIC was beforehand. The question that I have... which is better... local APIC or IO APIC. I am using IO APIC but traditionally I have not enabled the IO APIC.

Usuaully when I have enabled APIC on a machine there are no shared interrupts whatsoever. Using IO APIC like I am now I have less shared interrupts but there is still one interrupt that has 3 devices on it. They are nothing that are really going to cause each other problems but I was hoping someone could clarify.

[Tamerz]

Interesting. Well if I enable local APIC and not IO APIC everything seems fine. I'm thinking maybe my board just doesn't support the IO APIC even though I think the nForce3 chipset does.