ACPI? problem with release 8.0

[Malcolm Kay]

On Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:40 pm, Adam Vande More wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 1:01 AM, Malcolm Kay
>
> <malcolm.kay at internode.on.net>wrote:
> > I desperately need to make some progress on this issue.
> >
> > Is it likely that the issue is real rather than hardware
> > or disk corruption? Earlier releases are operating OK on the
> > same machine.
> >
> > I have now confirmed that:
> >  debug.acpi.disabled=acad button cpu lid thermal timer video
> > still leaves the system crashing and powering down when idle
> > for a while. And the more extensive:
> >  debug.acpi.disabled=acad bus children button cmbat cpu ec
> > isa lid pci pci_link sysresource thermal timer video
> > does the same.
> >
> > I don't really need power management but with acpi disabled
> > the disks are not visible to the system.
> >
> > Are there sysctl variables that can influence this
> > behaviour? Currently I believe we have:
> >
> > hw.acpi.supported_sleep_state: S1 S4 S5
> > hw.acpi.power_button_state: S5
> > hw.acpi.sleep_button_state: S1
> > hw.acpi.lid_switch_state: NONE
> > hw.acpi.standby_state: S1
> > hw.acpi.suspend_state: NONE
> > hw.acpi.sleep_delay: 1
> > hw.acpi.s4bios: 0
> > hw.acpi.verbose: 0
> > hw.acpi.disable_on_reboot: 0
> > hw.acpi.handle_reboot: 0
> > hw.acpi.reset_video: 0
> > hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest: C1
> > machdep.idle: amdc1e
> > machdep.idle_available: spin, amdc1e, hlt, acpi,
> >
> > However on the earlier RELEASEs that work I note we do not
> > have machdep.idle or machdep.idle_available. Instead I find:
> > machdep.cpu_idle_hlt: 1
> > machdep.hlt_cpus: 0
> >
> > Although I've not been able to relate this directly to my
> > problem from Googling it seems that there some issues with
> > amdc1e under BSD, Linux and perhaps Windows. But all the
> > references seem to amd c1e are related to systems in 64 bit
> > mode while I am running (or trying to run) i386 so I wonder
> > why I have:
> >  machdep.idle: amdc1e
> >
> > Maybe my problem is not acpi as such but this idle mode.
> >
> > My thought is to change this to
> >  machdep.idle: hlt
> > or even
> >  machdep.idle: acpi
> >
> > Any comments or ideas please!
> >
> > Thank you for your attention.
>
> Is there anything in /var/log/messages which indicates the
> cause?  Can you monitor cpu temp?

No clues in messages -- seems to just power down without any 
warning.

I don't seem to have any thermal monitoring readily available 
except in the BIOS screens -- which seem to indicate everything 
is fine. But I guess this is not really indicative of what is 
happening with a running system. But the same machine has run
earlier versions of FreeBSD staying up months at a time and only 
going down on power failures or on odd occassions I might want 
to look at BIOS settings or some such, so I feel fairly 
confident it is not a thermal issue.

Hmm, I think there might be a BIOS setting to switch on health 
reporting which I expect would show up under sysctl.

Thanks for the contribution.

The more I think about it the more I believe the issue is 
connected with machdep.idle: amdc1e
I am going to try changing this.

Thanks and regards,

Malcolm