Re: "device apic" required for atheros wireless driver?

--- Craig Boston <craig_at_xfoil.gank.org> wrote:

> Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2006 13:17:33 -0600
> From: Craig Boston <craig_at_xfoil.gank.org>
> To: Neil Short <neshort_at_yahoo.com>
> CC: freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: "device apic" required for atheros
> wireless driver?
> 
> On Sat, Nov 18, 2006 at 08:55:33PM -0800, Neil Short
> wrote:
> > finally it became evident that, at least on my
> system,
> > "device apic" under the "SMP kernel" section of
> the
> > configuration file seems to be required.
> 
> What is your system exactly?  Apologies if you've
> mentioned that before.
> I did a quick scan of recent list traffic and didn't
> see your original
> post.
> 
> Are you using ACPI?
> 
> It sounds like you probably have a broken BIOS. 
> I've seen a few ACPI
> DSDTs lately that have completely bogus IRQ routing
> in the !apic case.
> Most likely they assume apic will always be used
> because Windows XP uses
> it if present with no way to disable it.
> 
> On my laptop it looked like they hadn't even
> bothered to change the
> default _PRT method in the template that came from
> the BIOS vendor.
> 
> In any case, if your system has an apic and
> everything works fine using
> it, it's probably better to leave it in anyway.  It
> might be possible
> to hack in the correct routing manually, but you're
> less likely to end
> up with every device sharing a single IRQ when in
> apic mode, so you're
> usually better off.
> 
> Craig
> 

My system is a Toshiba Satellite A105-S101. The BIOS
setup is pretty much wysiwyg and very little
opportunity for any settings changes. I really don't
recommend it for open source OSen. The wireless device
times out on its own eventually no matter what OS is
running (although I never booted the thing with
Windows; so I can't speak about that. I've tried
several very recent Linuxes however and had the
issue.)

It does appear that the system has APIC. I have the
following lines in dmesg:

ACPI APIC Table: <TOSINV         APIC  >
ioapic0 <Version 2.1> irqs 0-23 on motherboard


 
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