amd64/129315: amd64 motherboard: Intel DG965WH motherboard compatibility with AMD64

[Robert J. Brown]

The following reply was made to PR amd64/129315; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Robert J. Brown" <rjb at robertjbrown.com>
To: Bruce Albrecht <bruce at zuhause.org>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: amd64/129315: amd64 motherboard: Intel DG965WH motherboard	compatibility with AMD64
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:05:13 -0800

 On Nov 30, 2008, at 8:28 PM, Bruce Albrecht wrote:
 >>
 >
 > How much memory is installed on this machine?  I have one of these  
 > motherboards, with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and 4 GB memory. Mine has an  
 > older BIOS (I think from about a year ago), but at the time there  
 > was a bug in the BIOS that caused it to return bad values so that  
 > the memory over 4GB was misclassified.  Linux users were able to  
 > manually reclassify the memory, but I never got it working on  
 > FreeBSD.  If you are running with more than 4GB memory, what happens  
 > if you remove memory, or add
 >
 > hw.physmem="4G"
 >
 > to /boot/loader.conf?
 >
 > Here's a link to a message thread to my problem with this board:
 > http://groups.google.com/group/lucky.freebsd.current/browse_thread/thread/92fd4e9ef6f2b5bb
 >
 
 
 Bruce,
 
 Thanks for the reply. This system has 3GB of memory, 2 banks of  
 matched 512MB and 2 banks of matched 1GB. I saw the BIOS weirdness  
 about the 4GB issue but since I have less than that amount I didn't  
 pay much attention to it. Thanks for the link - I will check that out  
 as well.
 
 For now I am trying various combinations of BIOS settings for the disk  
 controller combined with set hint.apic.0.disabled="1", unset  
 acpi_load, and set hint.acpi.0.disabled="1".  Disabling ACPI causes a  
 freeze instead of a complete reboot, which is progress. There are lots  
 of messages about not properly allocating IRQs which I find strange.  
 The system on 7.0-RELEASE with ACPI/APIC disabled hangs when trying to  
 mount the image to continue the installation.
 
 Do you have FreeBSD 7.X / amd64 running on this board? If yes, can you  
 provide your exact BIOS release? I'll downgrade to that and see if it  
 helps.
 
 Thanks,
 
 -Robert
 
 --
 Robert J. Brown
 rjb at robertjbrown.com