Gateway and FreeBSD

[Mike Dean]

* Sourabh Ladha <ladha at mail.eecis.udel.edu> [2003-05-05 22:56]:
>   I was trying to get FreeBSD 5.0 Release on my just bought Gateway Laptop
> (400x). unfortunately it seems there are lot of broken sides...One of the
> hardware that I could not find support was for my IDE controller
> (Intel 82801CAM):

> * pci0: <serial bus, SMBus> at driver 31.3 (no driver attached)
> * pci0: <simple comms> at device 31.6 (no driver attached)

> Unfortunately, I just can't proceed from this.

It would be nice to know exactly what you're seeing from this.  However,
I did have some significant problems with my Gateway 450L about at this
point when I was trying to install, so I'll go out on a limb and
speculate that this is the same problem (a page fault in the PCI code
was what I was dealing with).  This problem, incidentally, has nothing
to do with the IDE controller (Intel 82801CAM, which appears to be some
kind of unified bus control chip, is supported on my system).

Maybe someone else can fill me in as to why, but the Gateway requires a
tweak to the kernel environment in order to boot.  The following
assignment needs to be made:

hw.pci.allow_unsupported_io_range="1"

To do this, when you are booting the install disk, and it says "Press
[ENTER] to boot immediately, any other key for command prompt", press
another key (space works nicely).  Then, run the following commands:

set hw.pci.allow_unsupported_io_range="1"
boot

The machine will then (hopefully) boot (I never had any problems after
figuring this out).  This must be repeated each bootup; once you have
the system installed and running, put the following at the top of your
/boot/loader.conf:

hw.pci.allow_unsupported_io_range="1"

and the tweak will be applied automatically.  It should then boot and
operate properly.