Greetings! I want to contribute

[Nate Lawson]

John wrote:
> Good day, folks.
> 
> I am the owner of a Compaq Armada M700 which has some definite ACPI
> issues.  I didn't notice right away, because it came up properly,
> reported CPU and battery status reasonably, apm output was
> sensible, etc.  Events such as inserting a PCMCIA card or docking
> station events, and maybe even lid events caused the system to either
> instantly lock up tighter than a drum or do a trap 19/panic and
> then lock up.  The system has the 686H firmware, which is the
> latest, and with a date matching the latest from Compaq's firmware
> upgrade package.
> 
> I know that this is an older laptop, but at 650Mhz and a reasonable
> amount of RAM, it is an affordable and capable work station, and
> I would like to help with the efforts in support.  At a minimum,
> I hope to learn enough about ACPI to "blacklist" only the parts of
> the ACPI subdrivers that are causing the problem, but maybe I'll
> actually be able to fix something.  I haven't had any code in the
> release since about FreeBSD version 1.1, and it's about time I
> changed that. :)
> 
> I haven't even read the spec yet, so I obviously have a lot of
> learning to do.  I promise not to bug anyone for information until
> I've spent some time with the driver spec and the driver code.
> 
> Thanks, and I look forward to contributing something.

A good start is to read the acpi handbook entry and man pages.

-- 
Nate