Re: Disabled known-bad BIOS revisions

Riccardo Torrini wrote:
> As explained in UPDATING on 20040630, ACPI has been updated to disable
> known-bad BIOS revisions.  A message will be printed on the console...
> 
> Machine is a dual pIII/500, MoBo is an ASUS P2B-DS (dual+scsi)
> 
> Without hint.acpi.0.disabled="0" I got a "auto-reboot-without-panic"
> after loading kernel (or after loading/skipping ACPI, it is too fast
> so I can't see any message at all).

Try booting with "unset acpi_load" so that acpi is not even loaded. 
Does your system work then?  If so, the problem that needs to be fixed 
is booting with ACPI disabled and is a bug.  I find it hard to believe 
that your system was designed to not work without ACPI since it is from 
1999.

> (only a "don't know if related" problem: after switching to sound and
> snd_* my machine don't play any sound, device is found at boot but no
> mixer nor dsp are created into /dev, I will send a separate message).
> 
> Other test I have done between jul/aug:
> - kernel without SMP, no hint: GOOD, see the disabled message
> - kernel with SMP, hint to enable ACPI: GOOD, no message
> - kernel with SMP, no hint: FAIL, AUTO-REBOOT
> 
> Can I vote for "removing" this MoBo from quirks?  What test can I do
> to prove that is works?  If you need an acpi dump you can found here:
> 	ftp://ftp.torrini.org/pub/FreeBSD/trudy.acpidump-vt.gz
> 	ftp://ftp.torrini.org/pub/FreeBSD/trudy.acpidump-vtd.gz
> (first is acpidump -v -t, second is the same plus -d)

No, the hints give the same behavior you'd have on Windows, namely that 
it wouldn't even install the ACPI version of the HAL.  Note that with 
ACPI enabled your sound card doesn't work.  This machine's BIOS was 
built in 1999.  Linux doesn't even support ACPI for machines older than 
2001.

-Nate