Problems with HP dx5150/ATI Xpress 200 chipset

[Stuart Henderson]

--On 02 November 2005 15:19 -0800, Jeffrey Williams wrote:

> I have recently purchased a number HP DX5150 SFF desktops with idea
> of using them as basic infrastructure servers (e.g. DNS, DHCP, and
> firewall).  I prefer to use -stable versions of FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

A few general thoughts (no knowledge of the hardware, but worth a go):

- for OpenBSD, try -current snapshots (may fix bge). Ok it's not named 
"stable" but if it works and -stable doesn't, there's no loss...
- for FreeBSD, try 6.0RC1. ditto.
- if these options fail, is using a PCI nic an option? cards supported 
by sk(4) can be found reasonably cheaply and work well. From what I 
read, vge(4) aren't bad either.

- does the machine have apm anyway?

> obsd
> also incorrectly detects drive geometry but gets closer to the actual
> numbers fbsd, I did not try to manually correct, I am not as
> familiar/comfortable with openbsd's disklabel, the drive did "seem"
> more stable.

$ sudo disklabel -E sd0
# Inside MBR partition 3: type A6 start 63 size 1562353317

Treating sectors 63-1562353380 as the OpenBSD portion of the disk.
You can use the 'b' command to change this.

Initial label editor (enter '?' for help at any prompt)
> ?
Available commands:
[...]
        g [b|d|u] - use [b]ios, [d]isk or [u]ser geometry.

> APIC settings did not seem to affect obsd boot or installs

$ grep apic /usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/GENERIC*
/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/GENERIC.MP:ioapic*          at mainbus?

i.e. it's only used on the MP kernel.