5.1-RELEASE: Random lockups; ACPI issues; minor annoyances

I've encountered some suspicious random lock-ups under 5.1-RELEASE while
running KDE 3.1.2.  They occur on a monthly basis.  The machine doesn't
panic and I haven't been able to drop to the debugger yet.

Severity of the lock-ups has ranged from the odd time being able to
partially continue using shells and other programs (presumably those
that are already resident and if there isn't any disk access), to the
usual and resultant total lock-up which causes all programs to stop
responding to user input.  So far as I can tell, this wasn't occurring
under 4.7 on the system.

Usually, the machine stops responding to all input on the console with
X11 and the keyboard freezing and also stops moused input.  However the
network is still functional: Although the host continues responding to
pings and allows connections to open ports, there is no response on the
other end.

This has occurred under normal load with no resource shortage when it
occurs, and under heavy loads.  Usually it is preceded by fam exiting
on error 6 or general KDE instability.

Hardware: Athlon 2400 XP+, ECS Elitegroup L7VTA w/ onboard Promise 20265
ATA RAID ~(FastTrack BIOS Version 2.00.0.23), nVidia 4xAGP MX400/GeForce2

Additionally, I've been testing ACPI on this hardware.  ACPI would be
highly desirable for this desktop dev. workstation.

ACPI support: Suspend is currently buggy:
	- S1(POS): partially supported, tested to work in single user mode only. 
	- S3(STR): doesn't work most of the time.  When it did work, the
	  machine came back up with the array on Promise RAID controller in
	  an inconsistent state although sh still responded it spewed garbage
	  and couldn't use any external commands.
	- S4: ?? XX Unsupported..
	- ACPI requires that a keyboard be connected directly to the PC.
	  Some KVM-switches prevent ACPI from waking up when the keyboard
	  controller fails to reset.
	- Panic when suspending with a serial console.
	- CPU thermal zone, buttons: work fine.
	- ACPI related panic when vr0 isn't already down and shutdown -p
	  [Work Around: add to /etc/rc.shutdown:]
		echo -n 'Taking down interfaces:'
		for iface in `/sbin/ifconfig -l`; do
		    /sbin/ifconfig ${iface} down; echo -n " ${iface}"
		done; echo '.'

Other annoyance w/ this hardware:
	- Switching between X and console mode on sc0 is really slow
	  under FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE.
	- The video once went blank when switching between X and console
	  on sc0.  Also when using a serial console xdm strangeness.
	- USB related panic when detaching umass device w/ mounted
	  filesystem (for instance batteries run out).

Is this potentially a hardware issue?

I have setup a serial console and remote debugger to investigate these issues further.
I'm also going to try an up to date kernel w/ ACPI disabled.  dmesg and ACPI dump found at:
http://afields.ca/afields.ca-5.1-release-dmesg.txt  http://afields.ca/l7vta_acpi_dump.aml .

-- Allan Fields