ACPI problems with Dell laptops

[Eric Anderson]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 November 2005 at 17:12:46 -0800, Graham North wrote:
> 
>>Am currently trying to choose between a couple of laptops, the luck
>>winner of which will have Freebsd loaded alongside WinXP.
>>
>>Dell Latitude d600 with Radeon 9000? video, intel pro wireless
>>or
>>IBM R51 - Intel Extreme2, intel pro wireless.
>>The main differences will likely be the video and maybe bios, acpi...?
>>Can someone suggest to me whether these are both safe choices?
>>Am I better off installing 5.4 or 6.0?
> 
> 
> I've had both Dell and ThinkPad (no longer IBM).  I prefer Dell,
> despite their attempts to convince me otherwise.
> 
> However, we currently seem to have significant ACPI problems with Dell
> laptops.  I'm writing this on an Inspiron 6000 running 7-CURRENT, but
> the same problems occur with 6.0: if I enable ACPI, timing goes to
> hell, and some things just time out.  There was a similar message a
> couple of days ago from an owner of (I think) the latest Latitude
> machine, which sounded even worse.  My requests for feedback about how
> to solve the problem have so far not been resolved.  If you're
> otherwise tending towards Dell, I'd suggest you watch this space until
> there's some indication that the problems will be resolved.
> 
> Nothing of this says that ThinkPads will do better, of course.  I
> don't know what the situation is there.

Which scheduler are you using?  Also, have you tried disabling apic?  I 
had these same troubles, and worked around them, but I can't recall the 
exact trick - I seem to recall disabling apic and/or using 4BSD scheduler.

Eric




-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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