FreeBSD 6.0 on Sony Laptop

[Ruben de Groot]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 09:02:52AM +1100, Peter Clutton typed:
> On 11/14/05, Derek Tracy <tracyde at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have finally decided to ditch Gentoo for FreeBSD especially since the new
> > release is out now, but I have ran into a huge problem.
> > Upon trying to boot the install CD (I have tried both the bootonly and
> > official cd1) I get to sysinstall but when I try and partition the disks it
> > tells me it can not find any of the disks. I have been doing some research
> > on this and a few people were able to install the 5.4 release (I have not
> 
> Well I'm afraid I can only make a similar comment. I have FreeBSD 5.4
> release running smoothly on my Vaio. I wouldn't imagine the
> device.hints can help you, it sounds like the hardware isn't
> compatible or something and it can't see it. Exactly what is the
> laptop - make/model/specs. What hard drive, and what bus is it
> attached to? Are there any error messages on the emergency holographic
> shell, i think you can check with alt-F4.

/me too.
I finally settled for 5.4-RELEASE on my Vaio VGN-S5M/S. My quess from the
below snippet of dmesg is that there's something fishy about the second
controller (where the disk is attached) that is tolerated by 5.4's ata
driver, but not by 6.0's

atapci0: <Intel ICH6 UDMA100 controller> port 0x1880-0x188f,0x376,0x170-0x177,0x3f6,0x1f0-0x1f7 at device 31.1 on pci0
ata0: channel #0 on atapci0
ata1: channel #1 on atapci0
atapci1: <GENERIC ATA controller> port 0x18a0-0x18af,0x1894-0x1897,0x18b0-0x18b7,0x18b8-0x18bb,0x18c0-0x18c7 irq 18 at device 31.2 on pci0
ata2: channel #0 on atapci1
ata3: channel #1 on atapci1
acd0: DVDR <MATSHITAUJ-832D/1.02> at ata0-master PIO4
Interrupt storm detected on "irq18: atapci1"; throttling interrupt source
ad4: 76319MB <FUJITSU MHV2080BH/00000025> [155061/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA33

I'm planning to file a PR on this, but need to do some more research first.

Ruben