Re: 5.2-RELEASE TODO

On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Scott Long wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > On Monday,  1 December 2003 at 10:01:23 -0500, Robert Watson wrote:
...
> >
> > I'm currently investigating ACPI problems on a dual processor Intel
> > motherboard (re_at_ knows about this).  It looks as if the new code is
> > much fussier than the old code about the quality of the motherboard
> > BIOS: this machine runs fine on 5.1, but won't finish booting on
> > 5.2-BETA.  Yes, this is probably an ACPI bug, but users aren't going
> > to see it that way: if we release a 5.2 which won't boot on a lot of
> > machines, people are going to blame 5.2, not the machine.  I think we
> > should ensure that there's at least a fallback for machines with
> > broken ACPI.
>
> This argument is exactly why I added the 'disable acpi' option in the boot
> loader menu.  Of course, we STILL need to get good debugging information
> from you as to why you get a Trap 9 when ACPI is disabled.  This is the
> more important issue.

  Just to be complete, there are already a whole bunch of machines that
will not boot 5.x, irregardless of the ACPI issues.  I've never been able
to boot 5.x with ACPI on or off, on any of the 5 Dell PowerEdge 6350
servers I have here, even though they run 4.9 perfectly.  I have a PR open
on it.

  So even without the ACPI issues on some hardware, there are still other
reasons why 5.x is going to fail to boot.

Tom