Re: CPU class not configured problem in CURRENT-solved, boot problem -SOLVED

On Thu, 2006-Apr-06 12:14:24 +0900, Ganbold wrote:
>Yes, that was basically my fault, wasted your time on basic thing.
>I'm really sorry about that.

That's OK.  We all make mistakes.

>>I presume 6.x and -current behave the same.  This prompt is from the
>>second-stage boot loader (boot2).  If the problem goes away when you
>>add '-n' to your /boot.config then your bios isn't starting the 18.2Hz
>>timer.  Otherwise, I have no idea.
>>  
>Really great news, thanks a lot Peter, actually by adding -n option in 
>/boot.config solves
>the boot problem. It boots now without user intervention both 
>6.1-PRERELEASE and CURRENT.

Actually, this means your BIOS is broken.  It's supposed to initialise
one of the timers (I don't recall which one) to provice an 18.2Hz
interrupt and tick counter for MS-DOS.  FreeBSD boot2 (and possibly
loader) rely on this tick counter to provide timeouts when waiting
for input (normally there's a 3 or 5 second timeout at those prompts).
The '-n' disables the timeouts so you can no longer override the
defaults - this is not necessarily desirable in general.

You might like to look at the BIOS configuration to see if there's
anything that looks relevant.  Alternatively, you might try HP's
technical support and ask why the longword at 0x46c is not
incrementing (see sys/boot/i386/boot2/boot2.c:keyhit()).

Ubuntu presumably uses some alternative mechanism for any timeouts
whilst booting.

>However should this kind of situation must be documented somewhere, 
>maybe in FAQ ?

I don't recall anyone reporting this sort of problem before.

-- 
Peter Jeremy