ASUS A8N-VM unbootable (panics) with ACPI in 6.0-RELEASE

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Friday 30 December 2005 05:20, Justin Settle wrote:
> So my nice shiny new ASUS A8N-VM came in the mail today, and well, the
> system kernel panics if I try to boot it with ACPI.  This happens in
> both the i386 and AMD64 6.0-RELEASE installs.  The issue is the same one
> in this pr: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=standards/90871

See my recent posts re: A8N-VM CSM with the same issue. The DSDT table is so 
fundamentally broken (but has a correct checksum, so it's not an issue of one 
nibble falling over during manufacturing) that you can't use it on anything 
except Windows (which ignores the AML spec saying that names consist of 
characters A-Z and _). In any case, what I did to fix this was:

1) Boot 6.0-R x86 in ACPI disabled mode
2) Use acpidump to get the DSDT
3) Hex edit the DSDT (you can't disassemlble it because it's so broken)
4) Set that modified DSDT for use as per Handbook section 11.rumtiddlypo
5) Reboot into 6.0-R x86 with ACPI
6) Profit!

It seems to be a speedy and stable machine from there on in, at least when 
doing only one thing (portinstall kde) at a time.

If you like, I can post the modified DSDT on a website somewhere.

> The system then panics, waits 15 seconds and reboots.  If I boot the
> system without ACPI, it boots up, however my ata controller drops to
> ata-33.

Also with the fixed DSDT, ata-33. nForce430 is still too leading-edge. Do you 
get the nForce430 NIC listed at all? Mine doesn't even show up in pciconf 
-lv.

> please let me know.  I'm sure if this is fixable on the driver end or if
> I need to bug ASUS to fix it in the bios but this seemed like a good
> place to start.

I figured that the first BIOS update (to 0506) would fix the problem, but no. 
What's worse, it also made the machine lock up in x86 no-ACPI mode.

-- 
These are your friends - Adem
    GPG: FEA2 A3FE Adriaan de Groot
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