FreeBSD 7.0 SATA Controller

[Shaun Sabo]

the livefs cds do not drop you into a shell. they drop you into the same
screen you see when you insert an installation cd. try it on qemu or another
virtualization program or even boot one up if you have a spare cd rom. in
order to access the livefs shell you need to navigate to the fixit menu and
then go to the livefs CD/DVD option. as for the apic vc acpi that was a typo
due to exhaustion, sorry bout that.

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 10:42 PM, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 10:09:20PM -0400, Shaun Sabo wrote:
> > What happens with the bios is i start with the machine off. turn it on.
> boot
> > into any freebsd 7 based disk. ill exit the disk and tell it to reboot
> the
> > system. the system shuts down and it goes to turn on again. when you
> turn on
> > a dell computer a progress bar will fill and then it will go to the boot
> > loader/active partition, i believe that it initializes the bios
> settings.
> > what happens after i reboot out of the freebsd 7 based disks is the
> progress
> > bar hangs at about 2/3 full. i can boot into a cd or operating system
> fine
> > if i turn the machine completely off but something isnt re-settting when
> i
> > reboot out of freebsd. this used to happen when i tried using debian
> linux
> > because debian was still on the 2.4 kernel which did not have support
> for my
> > motherboard so i couldnt even boot the debian installer cd. i also tried
> > booting the freebsd installer disks without apic but the same problem
> occurs
> > so i dont think its hanging because of the power managment.
>
> APIC != ACPI.  If you disabled the APIC, you'd be changing the method of
> interrupt routing used by FreeBSD, which won't affect power management.
> Additionally, you need to understand that ACPI isn't used for just power
> management.  It's used to define system parameters via a series of
> tables which are stored in the BIOS.  There are a lot of motherboard
> manufacturers who have improper ACPI tables stored in their BIOS (read:
> BIOS bugs), and by disabling ACPI, one can sometimes work around odd
> problems with devices not working correctly, or odd system hangs.
>
> Finally, the behaviour you're experiencing with your machine (re: the
> progress bar stalling 2/3rds of the way through) sounds almost as if the
> hard disks aren't spinning up quick enough after a soft reset from
> within FreeBSD or Linux 2.4.  If there's a BIOS option to "delay hard
> disk startup", I would recommend setting that to 1-2 seconds and see
> what happens.  Otherwise, this really sounds like a BIOS bug, and much
> less like a FreeBSD or Linux bug.  I realise it may not happen with
> Linux 2.6, but possibly their reboot method changed.
>
> FreeBSD has a couple sysctls you can change which adjust the reboot
> method used.  One disabled ACPI during the reboot phase, which can
> sometimes cause the system to hang/lock before the reboot is complete.
> Another uses ACPI itself to do the rebooting, vs. (I believe) an older
> system reboot method.  These are the sysctls and their default values:
>
> hw.acpi.disable_on_reboot: 0
> hw.acpi.handle_reboot: 0
>
> > as for the livefs. i downloaded both the 7-STABLE and 7.0-RELEASE livefs
> > cds. when i boot them up it gets to the sysinstall program like all of
> the
> > other disks do. to use the livefs functions you have to go into fixit
> and
> > then choose the CD/DVD option. what this does is it mounts the
> filesystem
> > kept on the cd so that you can switch to the virtual terminal 4 (alt+f4)
> and
> > use the system as a recovery disk or for dmesg and such. the error i get
> is
> > "could not mount the livefs cd. try again?"
>
> Okay, you're confusing two things.  livefs != fixit.  What it sounds to
> me like you're doing is booting a CD of "disc1" and then going into the
> Fixit menu.  If you do this then insert a livefs CD, it's not going to
> work.
>
> When you boot a CD burnt with "livefs", the FreeBSD kernel will start,
> and you'll be immediately dropped into a shell with a whole ton of
> available utilities.  It's basically a working FreeBSD system on a CD,
> which is why it's called livefs.
>
> > for some reason i cannot mount any sort of media in freebsd 7 systems.
> > the computer handles the booting of the cd's fine but freebsd cannot
> > for some reason handle the mounting of disks. the next step im going
> > to take is installing 6.2 and remaking the world but adding device
> > aptic to the kernel.
>
> I think you mean "device apic" to the kernel?  Please see the first
> paragraph above; I think you're misunderstanding ACPI vs. APIC.
>
> You should follow the standard devices listed in the GENERIC
> configuration.  This includes support for APICs, as well as SMP.  Look
> at /sys/i386/conf/GENERIC, or /sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC (depending on if
> you went i386 or amd64).
>
> --
> | Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
> | Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
> | UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
> | Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
>
>