FreeBSD 5.2.1 and XFree86-4.x ati driver lockup problem -- Solution

[Brooks Davis]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 09:41:16PM -0500, James wrote:
> To the FreeBSD team,
> 
> I struggled with this one for quite a while before figuring it out, so 
> here goes...
> 
> I had been using FreeBSD 4x for quite some time on my Compaq Presario 
> 1800.  And, XFree86-3.6x worked nicely with the laptop's ATI Rage 
> Mobility graphics chip.  Unfortunately, the FreeBSD 4x branch didn't 
> support the Atheros chipsets in some of the newer networking cards like 
> the Netgear WG511, so I upgraded to FreeBSD 5.2.1.
> After that, I couldn't get XFree86-4x to work reliably with my laptop.
> It turned out that the X instability, which included complete system 
> lockup, was caused by the ACPI module being loaded upon boot-up. 
> Sometimes the Xserver would start-up sometimes not.  Also, there was a 
> guaranteed system lockup if you exited Xwindows and then re-entered 
> Xwindows at a later time.  In other words, you only got one Xsession per 
> boot!  So, after trying all sorts of things in XF86Config, and upgrading 
>  to XFree86-4.4 from XFree86-4.3 it turned out that all I needed to do 
> was add the following line to my /boot/device.hints file...
> 
>       hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
> 
> After that everything worked great!  Xwindows is stable, and my new 
> Netgear WG511 card is working like a charm.

You might try building a kernel without SMP and apic.  That let me use
my ATI Rage P/M Mobility reliably and still keep acpi enabled.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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