R32 on 5.2 (Was: Least supported laptop for FreeBSD under $1k)

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 06:53:13 -0500
> From: Josh Rivel <josh at freek.com>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> 
> Warner-
> 
> M. Warner Losh wrote...
> > So what's the least supported by FreeBSD modern laptop under $1k?  I'm
> > looking for one that has bad interrupt routing, resource conflict
> > issues or pccard/cardbus problems.  I'm not counting 'sound doesn't
> > work' or 'modem doens't work' as least supported for these purposes.
> 
> My IBM Thinkpad R32 works fine under FreeBSD/5.2-beta.  I paid $950
> for it new on ebay.  Only thing that doesn't seem to work (or maybe
> I just haven't figured it out yet) is suspend & resume.  Closing
> the lid brings this message:
> 
> acpi0: Sleep state S1 not supported by BIOS

IBM does not support the fairly useless S1 state, so this will not
work. You can use sysctl hw.acpi.lid_switch_state="S0" to eliminate the
message. It's likely that support will soon be added to turn off the
display with ACPI, but it's not there today. Also, suspend/resume is a
work in progress. Nate Lawson has put tremendous effort into ACPI, but
suspend/resume is clearly down the priority list from things like
interrupt routing that can keep a machine from booting.

If you need "working" suspend/resume, you should use APM instead of
ACPI. It has a couple of problems, but generally works well on
ThinkPads. 

The command "sysctl hw.acpi" will yield lots of interesting, if somewhat
cryptic information when you use ACPI. It will tell you what sleep
states are supported by your BIOS. It will also provide lots of power
management information (work in progress and rapidly improving) and
thermal information. FYI, the temperatures in ACPI are in tenths of a
degree Kelvin.

> Also, if I don't do a cold boot from WinXP into FreeBSD, once I start
> X the machine will hang and I need to remove the battery.  If I do a
> cold boot, it works fine (Had the same symptoms with both OpenBSD
> -current and Debian Linux unstable)

No idea on this one. the R32 has different graphics than my T30, I'm
afraid.

> I have not tried USB support with it however, so I can't speak to how
> that works.  Audio works fine, and my old-school Wavelan card works
> great.

USB generally works well, but there are lots of misc. devices that still
have problems and USB will not recover from suspend with ACPI.

> So I'd say that's a sub-$1k notebook that works well with FreeBSD.

But this is NOT what Warner is looking for. He wants one that is a total
mess for FreeBSD. Worst case, not best. He wants a single system that
can point to as many problems as possible so that they can be fixed.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634