kern/123140: SMP boot causes slow KB, ATA drives not detected

[Bob Frazier]

I've added some additional information to the bug report regarding ACPI 
tables and boot without ACPI.  If you happen to know where I can get 
some technical documentation on the NVidia chipset and perhaps even the 
board wiring (to see if the ACPI tables are just plain wrong) please let 
me know.  For now everything points to an improperly set up APIC, which 
either doesn't respond to the interrupts from the hardware, or responds 
incorrectly.  I'm concerned about the timer because I read some comments 
on-line regarding the NVidia APIC and the use of interrupt 2 for the 
timer (and incorrect ACPI tables in THAT particular case, early 2007 as 
I recall).  If this is the case with my board (bad table) I can attempt 
to work around it using the acpidump utility and the appropriate env 
vars to load a 'fixed' ACPI table.

I hope this information is helpful in resolving this particular problem. 
  I'm having some difficulting using kgdb at the moment since it doesn't 
seem to like my uplcom-based USB/Serial adaptor (it tends to crash/hang 
the machine running kgdb as a client and gets 'out of sync' with the 
serial data stream).  When I can get this working I'll try to localize 
the problem.