Fixing SMP on MacBooks

[Rui Paulo]

At Fri, 11 May 2007 12:19:37 +0200,
Florian C. Smeets wrote:
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> Rui Paulo wrote:
> > Hi,
> 
> Hi!
> 
> > I would like to bring this discussion to a wider audicence.
> > 
> > So, here's the problem:
> > As some of you already know, the second core on Apple's MacBooks fails
> > to start. There are two nasty tricks to make it start (both involve
> > interactivity from the user) that I know of.
> > 
> > They are:
> > 	1) Press the power button during the IPI timeout;
> > 	2) Press a key [1] before the IPIs are sent *OR* during the
> > 	   IPI timeout.
> > 
> > [1] This is really an interrupt. Pressing the Fn key doesn't work
> > because the Fn key doesn't generate an interrupt.
> > 
> > There tricks don't work on the MacBook Pro. While the source of the
> > problem might be the same, it's not clear why the tricks work.
> > 
> 
> Well i was able to boot a 7-CURRENT snapshot from February or March on a
> first rev. MBP and it did recognize the second core when pressing the
> power button right after this line:
> 
>  ACPI APIC Table: <APPLE  Apple00>
> 
> This used to work reliably.

Have you tried pressing a key?
I also have a first rev MBP and it works.

> Thanks for working on the MacBook support for FreeBSD! I will be setting
> up a partition for FreeBSD again this weekend. So if you have anything
> to test you can count me in :-)

No problem. I have drivers for the backlight and the CPU temperature
if you want to test.
I also have a fix for CPU frequency scaling.

--
Rui Paulo