Least supported laptop for FreeBSD under $1k

[Rahul Siddharthan]

"M. Warner Losh" wrote:
> I'm also most interested in the following trouble areas:
>         1) Interrupt routing problems
>         2) PC Card/CardBus problems
>         3) Resource conflicts
>         4) Interrupt storms
>         5) Hangs at the end of the boot sequence
>         6) ACPI issues relating to suspend/resume.

Since you haven't received too many replies, here I go with my 
HP Pavilion ZE5385US (over $1000, but should be similar to many ZE5000
series models which are under $1000).

1.  Cardbus: This is recognised in dmesg, 

cbb0: <O2Micro OZ6912/6972 PCI-CardBus Bridge> mem 0xd0002000-0xd0002fff at device 10.0 on pci0
cardbus0: <CardBus bus> on cbb0
pccard0: <16-bit PCCard bus> on cbb0
cbb0: [MPSAFE]

    but inserting the card does nothing -- no messages in dmesg etc,
    with or without devd running.  I'm not sure I'm doing this right,
    though.  This particular card (a 16 bit modem) worked fine on my
    old laptop with OLDCARD, both 4.x and 5.x, I used to use pccardc
    to manually power it up/down or pccardd to do it automatically, I
    understand neither is compatible with NEWCARD (anyway, neither
    works).  I haven't needed it so haven't investigated.  Sorry if
    this is something obvious and I should RTFM (I did briefly but
    didn't see anything).

2.  ACPI issues relating to suspend/resume: S3 doesn't work.  It
    suspends, but doesn't resume -- the power LED flashes when it's
    "suspended", but when trying to resume, the fan starts up but the
    screen backlight stays off and the harddisk shows no activity.  I
    have to hard-poweroff and reboot.  I understand S4 is not
    supported in any case.  (S3 is not supported in linux, but S4
    works via linux's swsusp.)

3.  Other ACPI issues: the battery doesn't get initialised and battery
    status sysctl's show nothing -- I get the message 

acpi_cmbat0: battery initialization failed, giving up

    The battery is fine with linux.  I haven't investigated further.

    The LCD brightness hotkeys also don't work, I think this is
    something to do with the embedded controller.  This, too, works
    fine in linux.  I get messages from the embedded controller like

acpi_ec0: <Embedded Controller: GPE 0x18> port 0x66,0x62 on acpi0
acpi_ec0: info: new max delay is 3 us
acpi_ec0: info: new max delay is 268 us
acpi_ec0: info: new max delay is 11000 us

There are also issues with X (in short: vesa works, radeon driver
doesn't), but I guess you're not interested in that and it may get
fixed in XFree86 4.4 anyway...

- Rahul