FreeBSD 6.1 & 6.2 hanging and/or spontaneous rebooting

[Joe Vender]

I think I've fixed the spontaneous reboot and system hang problem I've been 
having with FBSD 6.1 & 6.2 as described in earlier threads of the same 
subject. I'm now using FBSD 6.2 to send this message.

What I did was to set a hint in /boot/device.hints and also /boot/loader.conf 
to disable acpi
hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"

and then I set a hint to enable apm
hint.apm.0.disabled="0"
hint.apm.0.flags="0x20"

plus I set apm and apmd to start at boot in /etc/rc.conf
apm_enable="YES"
apmd_enable="YES"

and in /boot/loader.conf, I put
apm_load="YES"

The messages log shows that APM is being detected, and the computer now fully 
powers down via "shutdown -p now".

I've a suggestion. It would be nice if freebsd could try to detect if acpi is 
supported on the computer in which it is being installed, and if none is 
found, it should completely disable acpi and then check if apm is supported. 
It should then set the appropriate settings to enable the correct power 
management support for the computer. This would prevent this particular 
spontaneous rebooting and hanging on old computers like mine which are 
pre-acpi but have apm support.

So far, I haven't had any problems using KPPP. I've been up for over an hour 
and I've never been able keep the computer up for this long before making 
these changes.

Joe Vender