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

[Kris Kennaway]

Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:
> 
> 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.

Well yes, it could be that too, although you can't assume it is true 
either.  Either way there is not much that can be done on the FreeBSD 
end.  In theory you might be able to rewrite the AML to fix the problem 
if you can identify it, but this requires expert knowledge.

Kris