Toshiba Satellite L25 (how to run FreeBSD 6.0 on)

Craig Boston craig at feniz.gank.org
Fri Nov 25 20:52:34 GMT 2005


Sorry for the cross post, but there doesn't seem to be much traffic on
-mobile so I don't know how many people are reading it.  Please respect
reply-to freebsd-mobile@ and keep any discussion there and off of stable.

I picked up one of these laptops early this morning at the Best Buy
black friday sale since they were ridiculously cheap.  Of course the
first thing I did was pop in the 6.0 install CD.  Here are my results in
the hope that they may help someone else who grabbed one of these.

First of all, ACPI is severiously broken on this machine.  It boots and
appears to be ok at first, but half the hardware doesn't work.  The
integrated NIC (realtek, yuck) starts getting watchdog timeouts as soon
as it's brought up.  So did the 3Com cardbus NIC I popped in.  An old
16-bit PCMCIA NIC just froze and didn't do anything.

There are also a lot of complaints about the \_SB_.BAT1._BST method
being busted (can't find [Z00D] in namespace), and as a result the
battery status cannot be read.

Attempting to boot with ACPI disabled results in a panic:

MPTable: <  RS400 Board>
ioapic0: Assuming intbase of 0
panic: Bogus interrupt flags

Okay, so it appears the APIC setup in the mptable is hosed as well.
Disabling both ACPI and APIC (hint.apic.0.disabled="1" in device.hints)
results in a working system, but alas without power management.

I lucked out and the wireless is an Atheros 5212.  With ACPI on it was
able to scan once before it just stopped working (my guess is interrupt
routing is screwed up somewhere), but with ACPI & APIC disabled it works
fine.  Just make sure to hit the button on the front to enable the radio
as it appears to be hardware controlled in this machine rather than
software.

Sound doesn't work.  It's an ATI IXP SB400 audio controller according
to pciids.sf.net, but it's an AC97 based one so it shouldn't be too hard
to hack together a driver for it.

The video is listed as a Radeon Xpress 200M.  I doubt there's any 3D
support for it, but I'll be installing Xorg in a bit to see if I can get
2D working.

Here's some technical info for any who want it:

http://www.gank.org/freebsd/l25/dmesg.txt
http://www.gank.org/freebsd/l25/pciconf.txt
http://www.gank.org/freebsd/l25/mptable.txt

I'll probably start hacking on the ASL to see if I can repair ACPI
support first, then work on a sound driver if I can't find one.  I'll
post any progress or new information on the -mobile list.

Craig


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