ECS/PCChips G713 - PCI problems

[Marcos Hiroshi Umino]

  Hello freemen.

  I'm new to the BSD world, I use gentoo linux on my notebook and I now need to use freebsd in a server I'm managing. To better learn the tricks of the OS, I decided to install freebsd on my notebook, an ECS/PCChips G713, Sis746FX/963, Ati Radeon 9000M, Athlon XP-M 1600+.

  From my linux experience, I already know it's ACPI and APIC implementation is very buggy. However, disabling both (and enabling APM) I did had success installing linux on it. It's kernel is gentoo-2.6.7, quite stable.

  However, booting from the installation FreeBSD 5.2.1 CD, I have to disable ACPI, it does boot, but no PCI device is recognized. It seems a very rare error, because no googling I did reported such problem.

  It does recognizes some unknown PNP devices, I can send these here, but since the number of specific mailing lists is big, I decided first to ask for advice. Should I try to solve it here or somewhere else? 

  Anyway, some more data I gathered:

  I guess all the problems track down to the BIOS ACPI implementation. Gentoo looks to be gathering PCI data not from ACPI, but somewhere else. I'm no kernel expert, so I have no idea how it is done.

  pciconf -lv returns *NO* data, no error message, nothing. It simply returns to the prompt. I see no data on /dev/pci. Booting with ACPI orders me to reboot, last message says something about ACPI not able to gather pci device table. Booting without ACPI tells me some unknown PNP devices weren't enabled. 

  The BIOS seems very buggy, however ECS/PCChips didn't offer any help yet. There is a flash utility, but it doesn't seem to be working. I'm waiting for some answer, but somehow I guess they won't answer.

  So, following many pointers, I dumped the asl code, however I have no idea as to how to understand or fix it. I tried googling a little. Seems like I'm the first G713 owner to try freebsd on it. (It is a very cheap notebook, the best I could afford). 

  Thanks for any pointer or RTFMs, and sorry for the long post.

  Marcos.