On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX) <lyn...@orthanc.ca> wrote: > What's not working is the ACPI component of the BIOS. The P9 boot > fails very early on (right after E820 I think). FreeBSD runs, but > something in the ACPI code wakes up every couple of seconds and leaps > into the ACPI BIOS code. While it's in there it locks out all > hardware interrupts for 2-5 seconds, which makes the box pretty much > unusable for anything close to interactive work.
This is many times code doing a bug fix for hardware. It is most likely in the System Management Mode (SMM) code, not in the ACPI BIOS per se. Intel has told me they count on magic happening in ACPI/SMM to fix up hardware bugs (for which they frequently refuse to release any documentation so the OS can do the workaround instead). But 2-5 seconds? WOW. That's gotta be a record. What could it be doing for that long? I wonder if you have a first example of the oft-rumored ACPI virus :-) > > As to workarounds, I worked around to the computer store and bought a > non-Intel motherboard that actually implements Intel's ACPI spec > somewhat correctly. I'm not going to spend time I could be billing > out to try to fix a completely braindead motherboard that I can > replace for what I earn in an hour or two. Shitty hardware like this > deserves to die, not get fixed. I assume we can count on getting a video of whatever you do to it? ron
