Solved: ACPI problems: System grinds to a halt

[Erik Nørgaard]

I have eventually found the solution, for others who may have problems,
the solution is below:

Erik Nørgaard wrote:

> I have problems booting with ACPI enabled. The result varies among three:
> 
> 1) The kernel will print a number of error messages:
> 
>    ACPI-0800: *** ERROR: AcpiEvGpeDispatch: No handler or methdo
>        for GPE[ 6], disabling event
> 
>    then hang after identifying the hard disk.
> 
> 2) Same as above, but the messages repeats flickering over the screen
>    apparently in an infinite loop.
> 
> 3) The system boots up, but with seriously reduced performance:
> 
>    Booting takes 3min20sec before the login console is presented, and
>    building the acpi kernel module takes 54min15sec! With acpi disabled
>    booting takes 30sec, and building the acpi module 19sec.
> 
> Evidently something is going on,
> 
> I beleive it to be hardware conflicts. I have had interrupt storm on
> irq5 when configuring the wireless nic which is on irq10 (default), and
> on irq7 when moving a connected usb mouse. Usb devices may be found if
> attached before boot, although this is no guarantee that they will work.
> 
> Another peculiar observation is that it seems to give more consistent
> result when acpi is built with debugging on(!).
> 
> ACPI however seems to be supported when/if the system comes up: The
> device is found and kernel tunables are there. 'halt -p' will halt and
> power down the machine.

All the problems I have had, including the described problems with iwi
(other thread) turned out to be related to one issue: There is a
conflict between acpi and apic.

apic is compiled in the GENERIC kernel, and the config leaves no clue of
what it's for. Looking in the NOTES, "The apic device enables the use of
the I/O APIC for interrupt delivery" and is required for SMP. This
explains the interrupt problems when both ACPI and APIC attempts to
handle interrupts - I guess this should result in a PR?

Anyway, two equivalent solutions seem to be:

1) Disable apic, set hint.apic.0.disabled="1" in loader.conf
2) Compile the kernel without "device apic"

I have only tried 2) though.

Cheers, Erik
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