FreeBSD 5.4-RC3 hangs on boot, 5.3 works

[Arjan Van Leeuwen]

On 4/21/05, Arjan Van Leeuwen <avleeuwen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/21/05, Arjan Van Leeuwen <avleeuwen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm trying to install FreeBSD 5.4-RC3 on a Lex Neo system
> > (http://www.lex.com.tw, a small form factor PC with a 1GHz VIA C3
> > processor).
> >
> > The system hangs when booting the kernel, at this point:
> >
> > Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
> > CPU: VIA C3 Nehemiah+RNG+ACE (998.70-MHz 686-class CPU)
> >   Origin = "CentaurHauls"  Id = 0x698  Stepping = 8
> >   Features=0x381b93f<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,CMOV,PAT,MMX,FXSR,S
> > SE>
> > real memory  = 125763584 (119 MB)
> > avail memory = 113414144 (108 MB)
> > npx0: [FAST]
> >
> (...)
> >
> > Booting in safe mode, turning off ACPI in the BIOS of the machine and
> > changing 'PNP OS' to yes or no in the BIOS does not help.
> 
> I just tried changing hint.npx.0.flags to 0x07 and 0x01, which also
> doesn't help.

I found something that looks like a solution for NetBSD on Google Groups here:

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=41555.144.59.164.106.1105346400.squirrel%40144.59.164.106

where they use

npx*  at acpi?  # Math coprocessor

to force npx via the acpi table. Is something like this possible on FreeBSD?

Arjan