FreeBSD 6.1 & 6.2 hanging and/or spontaneous rebooting

[Ian Smith]

In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 162, Issue 18
As Message: 6
On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:36:14 -0600 Joe Vender <jvender at owensboro.net> wrote:

Argh, digests .. sorry, this came in just after my previous post:

 > 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.

Sounds like an issue, but I don't think you need to recompile a kernel
to get APM, if you add 'hint.apm.0.disabled=0' to /boot/loader.conf it
should load with GENERIC.  It does on 5.x anyway, though I did compile
an APM kernel later, after getting things going that way.

 > 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.

I still think that may be a KPPP issue, but we need to see your dmesg as
to whether ACPI is being used/detected (which likely won't work well if
at all with a machine that old, whereas APM is much more likely to).

Check that APM, rather than ACPI, is enabled in your BIOS.

 > > 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...

Sad but true.  4.x GENERIC had APM in kernel iirc, 5.x and 6.x don't.

 > 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.

I'm running 5.5-STABLE here on a Compaq Armada 1500c, using APM.  I
could be wrong, but I don't think the APM code has changed noticeably
between 5.5 and 6.x, so I really wouldn't recommend going back to 5.5
until you've tried resolving this on 6.2 first, using the hints in
/boot/loader.conf first, and if necessary compiling APM into kernel.

Your /var/run/dmesg.boot, please, both re this and the sio issue.

Cheers, Ian