buggy ACPI on board versus HW failure Re: no SMP without ACPI? (amd64)

[Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC]

On Sep 7, 2007, at 3:14 AM, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:
>> On Sep 5, 2007, at 3:07 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>>>> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Kris  
>>>> Kennaway
>>>> Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 1:57 AM
>>>> To: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
>>>> Cc: User Questions
>>>> Subject: Re: no SMP without ACPI? (amd64)
>>>>
>>>
>>>> Note that this may well be hardware related: without acpi you  
>>>> are only
>>>> using one CPU, etc, so if one of the others is bad it will only  
>>>> fail
>>>> when you have ACPI enabled -- even if ACPI itself is not to blame.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Easily testable by running that Other Operating system on the thing
>>> which I would have expected Chad to have done.
>> Sorry to be MIA for the last day.
>> No, I did not test it with that OS which shall not be named.   
>> However, I did attempt to install Sol10 on it.  Sol10 also relies  
>> on ACPI btw.  Anyway, the same error happened a good way through  
>> the installation -- it rebooted itself during the high IO of  
>> installing the system onto the system array.  Sol10 uses a 32bit  
>> kernel for the installation and I think, but am not sure, that it  
>> only activates 1 CPU core.
>
> Then something is wrong with your hardware.  Sorry.


Please explain how my conclusion, that ACPI is messed up on this  
board (BIOS is buggy) is not a as reasonable an assumption as your  
conclusion?  If the BIOS is buggy, Sol10 could just as easily trigger  
the same state as FBSD based on bad ACPI info.  That is NO indication  
that the HW is bad.

(As an aside, I forgot to mention, that I tried another example of  
the same disk controller, to rule out HW problems with the disk  
controller, and the problem persisted)

The facts so far point more to ACPI being buggy on this board than to  
HW failure in my estimation.

Chad