FreeBSD 6.1 & 6.2 hanging and/or spontaneous rebooting

[Joe Vender]

On Friday 26 January 2007 18:18, Chuck Swiger wrote:

> The GUI commands within KDE are going to invoke the command-line
> shutdown command with the appropriate arguments.  What may be going
> on is that your old hardware only supports the older form of power
> management/shutdown mechanism, called APM, rather than the newer
> APCI.  You might find that reading "man 4 apm" and "man acpi" will
> give you some hints on debugging the issue.  It might help to try
> updating your machines BIOS, or to recompile a kernel with ACPI
> disabled but the older APM enabled, and see whether that gets you
> somewhere.
>

There is no update to my machine BIOS as far as I know. What I have now is the 
last software that was released for it, and that was years ago. I have 
actually wondered if I should disable ACPI and enable APM in a new kernel 
build. I'll give it a try if I can get the real issue, which is the 
spontaneous reboots freezes, solved.

> The fact that you can shutdown within Linux suggests that your
> hardware does have the capability, so it's just a matter of figuring
> out what's different.  Note that you might find that trying to run
> FreeBSD 4.11 to be informative, as the defaults for that older
> version might correspond with your hardware better, although, 4.11 is
> at the end of it's supported lifespan...

I've been seriously thinking about getting a copy of the legacy FBSD 5.5 
that's on the website. Maybe there isn't a difference between it and the 6.2 
as far as this powerdown issue is concerned.