Greetings! I want to contribute

[Nikolas Britton]

Nate Lawson wrote:

> John wrote:
>
>> Good day, folks.
>>
>> I am the owner of a Compaq Armada M700 which has some definite ACPI
>> issues.  I didn't notice right away, because it came up properly,
>> reported CPU and battery status reasonably, apm output was
>> sensible, etc.  Events such as inserting a PCMCIA card or docking
>> station events, and maybe even lid events caused the system to either
>> instantly lock up tighter than a drum or do a trap 19/panic and
>> then lock up.  The system has the 686H firmware, which is the
>> latest, and with a date matching the latest from Compaq's firmware
>> upgrade package.
>>
>> I know that this is an older laptop, but at 650Mhz and a reasonable
>> amount of RAM, it is an affordable and capable work station, and
>> I would like to help with the efforts in support.  At a minimum,
>> I hope to learn enough about ACPI to "blacklist" only the parts of
>> the ACPI subdrivers that are causing the problem, but maybe I'll
>> actually be able to fix something.  I haven't had any code in the
>> release since about FreeBSD version 1.1, and it's about time I
>> changed that. :)
>>
>> I haven't even read the spec yet, so I obviously have a lot of
>> learning to do.  I promise not to bug anyone for information until
>> I've spent some time with the driver spec and the driver code.
>>
>> Thanks, and I look forward to contributing something.
>
>
> A good start is to read the acpi handbook entry and man pages.
>
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/acpi-debug.html
Fixed (?) DSDT for the Armada M700: 
http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/view.php?id=27
http://gerda.univie.ac.at/freebsd-laptops/

And quoting nate from the problems I had with the Armada 1750:

"I've attached the diff between the two versions for history.  But all 
you have to do is download the patched ASL 
("Compaq-Armada_1700_1750_3500-686EM_99.1130_A-custom.asl") and 
compile/override it.  See the handbook or "man acpi" for steps, but the 
short of it is:

iasl Compaq-Armada_1700_1750_3500-686EM_99.1130_A-custom.asl
cp DSDT.aml /boot

And add to /boot/loader.conf:
acpi_dsdt_load="YES"
acpi_dsdt_name="/boot/DSDT.aml"

This will load your custom AML at boot time."
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BTW Nate... Thanks again for helpin me.