ACPI, 5.4R, Inspiron 7500, floppy not working

[Bob Johnson]

I don't use the floppy drive in my laptop (an Inspiron 7500) often, so it was 
only a few days ago that I discovered that my floppy drive is not being 
properly recognized in 5.4R with the generic kernel.  I put my test drive in 
the system, and it turns out that the floppy wasn't working in 5.3R either. 

If I disable ACPI the floppy drive is set up properly and works fine in 5.4R.

I'm now booting off my old (i.e. spare)  production drive with 5.2.1R on it, 
and the floppy is working fine.  So some time after 5.2.1R something changed 
that keeps the floppy from being set up correctly.

In 5.3 and 5.4, the drive controller is initially recognized and fdc0 appears 
to attach to it, but when I looked at a verbose dmesg, it appeared that the 
ACPI system is deciding that the drive isn't usable.  As a result, there is 
no /dev/fd0 device installed.  Unfortunately, at the moment I'm booted from 
5.2.1, so I can't include the dmesg from the 5.4R boot, but I do have a copy 
of the dmesg from a 5.3R boot attached below, it seems to show that fdc0 is 
set up, but not fd0.

The fdc(4) man page says I need "device fdc" and "device fd" in my kernel 
config, but if I do that in 5.4R, I get an error message that says "device 
fd" is not valid.

With that background, here are my questions:

1) Is there an easy way to get my floppy drive working in 5.4R without 
disabling ACPI?  I don't really want to track -stable, I prefer the security 
branch, and either way, anything involving building a new world will take the 
rest of the weekend on this system.

2) What do  I lose by disabling ACPI?  Under 4.x I had APM working with 
suspend to disk working well, so is there any real reason to stick with ACPI 
rather than going back to that?

3) Is this likely to be fixed in 6.0 when it is released?  If it is, I'll 
probably ignore it until then.  Unfortunately, I have more urgent problems to 
deal with this weekend and I'm not likely to have time to install my 6.0 
beta3 CDs to find out.

Thanks for any info you can provide.

Below is a dmesg.boot from 5.3R.  

Thanks,

- Bob

Copyright (c) 1992-2004 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD 5.3-SECURITY #0: Fri Jan  7 04:09:28 UTC 2005
    root at builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Intel Pentium III (501.14-MHz 686-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x683  Stepping = 3
  Features=0x383f9ff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PA
T,PSE36,MMX,FXSR,SSE>
real memory  = 402587648 (383 MB)
avail memory = 384249856 (366 MB)
npx0: [FAST]
npx0: <math processor> on motherboard
npx0: INT 16 interface
acpi0: <DELL I 7500 > on motherboard
acpi_ec0: <Embedded Controller: GPE 0x9> port 0x66,0x62 on acpi0
Timecounter "ACPI-safe" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000
acpi_timer0: <24-bit timer at 3.579545MHz> port 0x1008-0x100b on acpi0
cpu0: <ACPI CPU (3 Cx states)> on acpi0
acpi_tz0: <Thermal Zone> on acpi0
acpi_lid0: <Control Method Lid Switch> on acpi0
acpi_cmbat0: <Control Method Battery> on acpi0
acpi_cmbat1: <Control Method Battery> on acpi0
acpi_acad0: <AC Adapter> on acpi0
pcib0: <ACPI Host-PCI bridge> port 0x1000-0x1015,0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0
pci0: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib0
agp0: <Intel 82443BX (440 BX) host to PCI bridge> mem 0xe0000000-0xe3ffffff at 
d
evice 0.0 on pci0
pcib1: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> at device 1.0 on pci0
pci1: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib1
pci1: <display, VGA> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)
cbb0: <TI1225 PCI-CardBus Bridge> at device 4.0 on pci0
cardbus0: <CardBus bus> on cbb0
pccard0: <16-bit PCCard bus> on cbb0
cbb1: <TI1225 PCI-CardBus Bridge> at device 4.1 on pci0
cardbus1: <CardBus bus> on cbb1
pccard1: <16-bit PCCard bus> on cbb1
isab0: <PCI-ISA bridge> at device 7.0 on pci0
isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0
atapci0: <Intel PIIX4 UDMA33 controller> port 
0x1050-0x105f,0x376,0x170-0x177,0x
3f6,0x1f0-0x1f7 at device 7.1 on pci0
ata0: channel #0 on atapci0
ata1: channel #1 on atapci0
uhci0: <Intel 82371AB/EB (PIIX4) USB controller> port 0x1060-0x107f irq 5 at 
dev
ice 7.2 on pci0
uhci0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
usb0: <Intel 82371AB/EB (PIIX4) USB controller> on uhci0
usb0: USB revision 1.0
uhub0: Intel UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
pci0: <bridge, PCI-unknown> at device 7.3 (no driver attached)
pcm0: <ESS Technology Maestro-2E> port 0x1400-0x14ff irq 5 at device 8.0 on 
pci0
pcm0: <SigmaTel STAC9721/23 AC97 Codec>
pcm0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
acpi_button0: <Power Button> on acpi0
acpi_button1: <Sleep Button> on acpi0
atkbdc0: <Keyboard controller (i8042)> port 0x64,0x60 irq 1 on acpi0
atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> irq 1 on atkbdc0
kbd0 at atkbd0
atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> irq 12 on atkbdc0
psm0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
psm0: model Generic PS/2 mouse, device ID 0
fdc0: <floppy drive controller (FDE)> port 0x3f7,0x3f0-0x3f5 irq 6 drq 2 on 
acpi
0
fdc0: [FAST]
ppc0: <ECP parallel printer port> port 0x778-0x77f,0x378-0x37f irq 7 drq 3 on 
ac
pi0
ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode
ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/7 bytes threshold
ppbus0: <Parallel port bus> on ppc0
ppbus0: IEEE1284 device found /NIBBLE
Probing for PnP devices on ppbus0:
ppbus0: <Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 6L/0101.01> PRINTER HP ENHANCED PCL5,PJL
plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0
lpt0: <Printer> on ppbus0
lpt0: Interrupt-driven port
ppi0: <Parallel I/O> on ppbus0
sio0: <16550A-compatible COM port> port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on acpi0
sio0: type 16550A
orm0: <ISA Option ROM> at iomem 0xc0000-0xcffff on isa0
pmtimer0 on isa0
sc0: <System console> at flags 0x100 on isa0
sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300>
sio1: configured irq 3 not in bitmap of probed irqs 0
sio1: port may not be enabled
vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0
Timecounter "TSC" frequency 501138628 Hz quality 800
Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec
acpi_cpu: throttling enabled, 8 steps (100% to 12.5%), currently 100.0%
wi0: <Belkin 11Mbps Wireless Notebook Network Adapter> at port 0x100-0x13f irq 
1
1 function 0 config 1 on pccard0
wi0: using RF:PRISM2 MAC:HFA3841 CARD:HWB3163 rev.A
wi0: Intersil Firmware: Primary (0.3.0), Station (0.8.3)
wi0: Ethernet address: 00:30:bd:62:ef:95
wi0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
ad0: 6194MB <FUJITSU MHE2064AT/A018> [13424/15/63] at ata0-master UDMA33
acd0: DVDROM <TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-C2402/1015> at ata1-master UDMA33
Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a
warning: KLD '/boot/kernel/linprocfs.ko' is newer than the linker.hints file