freebsd in compaq presario 900

[Astrodog]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 07:52:05 -0500, Coleman Kane <zombyfork at gmail.com> wrote:
> Possibly because a lot of the compaq R3000 and HP zv5000 problems are
> related to the NVidia nForce chipset and not directly to the CPU.
> 
> In fact, my GW 7422GX worked perfectly fine out-of-the-box with the
> 5.3 install disc. I had to turn off write caching (hw.ata.wc=0) to
> eliminate some ufs corruption. This laptop is based upon a VIA K8
> board and many of the components are similar to the K7 VIA boards.
> 
> The only thing I needed to patch was the acpi_ppc driver for the
> Cool'n'Quiet tech which seems to be replacing the PowerNOW! tech on
> older athlons. My guess is the XP-M (based on the K8 Mobile core,
> rather than the K7) also have the newer power saving tech.  In
> addition, the nForce platform seems to be popular as an integrated
> alternative to the centrino platform, so HP seems to be moving in that
> direction with their laptops.
> 
> Many of the problems that have been attirbuted to the 'AMD64' platform
> are artifacts of the platforms available for the AMD64 solutions, and
> not the cpus themselves. Also, many of the new XP-M's are K8 cores,
> but only run in short (32-bit) mode (I think).
> 
> 
> On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 22:01:20 -0800 (PST), Neil Short <neshort at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > --- Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> >
> > > BTW, AFAICT it doesn't have an amd64 chip, just a
> > > regular 32 bit
> > > Athlon. So you'd want to install an i386 version of
> > > FreeBSD, not the
> > > amd64 one.
> >
> > My laptop (HP ZV5000) is the same as the Compaq R3000.
> > It has the same exact problems; although I ordered an
> > Athlon XP-M processor for it (for some dumb reason).
> > All the AMD64 patches for the compaq/hp laptops have
> > been applicable to mine as well - even though the
> > processor isn't 64 bit
> >
> > =====
> > If history always begins this morning, the world holds
> > exciting surprises around every corner (241).
> > --Ann Coulter. Treason.
> >
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> 

If its of interest to anyone, in the phone calls I've had with
Compaq/HP trying to get documentation on some of this, they're aware
of the issue and have been trying to get it resolved. Aparently nvidia
ignored a few standards while doing the NF3 150 stuff for mobiles,
thus causing the issues. I was also told it does extend to any
notebook that uses an NForce3 based motherboard, that HP/Compaq
manufactures. Maybe we should treat this as a FreeBSD-mobile issue,
rather than an -AMD64 one?

---- Harrison Grundy