Hello Mike,
Thank you for the reply. Here's a summary and "timeline of events" as
it were to help you decypher the admittedly cryptic thread:
1) Got the old netbook with its stock F.13 firmware. OpenBSD 7.8
installer boots great, installation succeeds, but because of package
availabilty for i386 chose to install NetBSD 10.1.
2) The stock WiFi card was unsupported by all BSD's (Broadcom) and so I
decided to swap it out with an `athn0` supported one. Discover the BIOS
has a PCI whitelist and it refuses to boot.
3) Applied a patched newer F.16 BIOS available online. Laptop boots
again, NetBSD works great, athn0 card recognised, all is fine.
WindowsXP works too.
4) I try to boot the OpenBSD installer again, and now the OpenBSD
installer panics -- see first message in the thread. I sent installer
error output and a NetBSD dmesg as that is the only thing I could
generate.
5) On Crystal's suggestion I tried a few things:
- Disabled acpi in the OpenBSD installer boot prompt. This got
me a booting installer with a patched BIOS.
- Reinstalled the official F.16 BIOS to see whether wmihp0
still complains under NetBSD. It does.
- Confirmed that the OpenBSD7.8 installer can boot again, and
sent on dmesg.booted with stock BIOS, as now I could supply
what I couldn't send earlier.
Why I think my troubles with a hacked BIOS could merit the attention of
bugs@:
While the sketchy BIOS may well have inconsistencies, everything else I
tried manages to boot, and it is only OpenBSD so far that panics. This
made me think that the way OpenBSD handles the BIOS boot / acpi on i386
might have particularities that need examining.
I fully understand if this is not something you wish to spend time on
with the patched BIOS, it is your call, and I would not wish to presume
on developers' time. But this might equally be a stress test of the code
that surfaces issues that so far did not come to light and you might
find it valuable.
I'm happy to stay on NetBSD on this laptop as it works, it's not about
me demanding free personalised support for a custom project, I'm only
hoping that my troubles can help point to possible improvements to the
codebase.
Hope this clears it up!
Best wishes for the new year,
requiem
On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 20:17:07 -0800
On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 20:17:07 -0800
Mike Larkin <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 03, 2026 at 11:20:04AM +0000, requiem. wrote:
> > I managed to find and re-flash the stock F.16 BIOS version from HP
> > (usually don't trust those 3rd party "driver installer" sites but it
> > came through this time). The whitelist is back (yay, I guess), but
> > with the wi-fi card removed I've managed to run some more tests. As
> > I opened up the case I also installed a new CMOS battery, just to
> > be safe.
> >
> > On Wed, 31 Dec 2025 10:28:07 +0000 Crystal
> > Kolipe <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > > [ 1.023181] wmihp0 at acpiwmi0: HP WMI mappings
> > > > [ 1.023181] wmihp0: autoconfiguration error: failed to get
> > > > data for event 0x80: AE_BAD_DATA
> >
> > This seems to be the case also with the stock BIOS. dmesg.boot on
> > NetBSD still has the same error after flashing the stock F.16 BIOS.
> >
> > > > Just brwowsing through the dmesg I notice the CMOS clock is way
> > > > off. Possibly a dead battery. Would that cause issues?
> > >
> > > Probably not the cause of this specific problem, but in general a
> > > faulty CMOS battery can potentially cause all sorts of non-obvious
> > > and difficult to identify issues, so if you can replace it that
> > > would probably be a good idea.
> >
> > I did, well, didn't seem to make a difference. Clock keeps time at
> > least.
> >
> > > For testing purposes only and to try to gather more information,
> > > can you try booting the OpenBSD installer and disabling the acpi
> > > driver in the bootloader?
> > >
> > Dropping to config with `boot -c` and then calling `disable acpi`
> > gets me a working installer. Attaching a dmesg for this one too.
> >
>
> Sorry, I'm lost here.
>
> To summarize:
>
> 1. you had a configuration that worked before.
>
> 2. you changed a bunch of devices and flashed some hacked/sketchy bios
>
> 3. things broke
>
> I don't understand the dmesg pastes above, they don't look like
> openbsd.
>
> I would recommend you start undoing the changes you made one at a
> time, and tell us which change breaks things. And if it's the
> hacked/sketchy bios then you might be SOL. It's too hard to diagnose
> "I changed a bunch of things and now nothing works, please help".
>
> PS at this point I don't even grok from the mail above if reverting
> the BIOS change fixed anything. It seems like you're replying to
> multiple threads.
>
> -ml
