On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Johan Beisser <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 10:26 AM, STeve Andre' <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I've never tried installing OpenBSD on a 600x but I'm a little surprised > that >> it isn't working fine. > > You're in for a few surprises when you do then. It should work fine, > but there's some ACPI issues that have never been addressed. > >> Since you are new to OpenBSD, how did you get OpenBSD, and also how >> (where) did you get the packages? You MUST get the packages that >> match the version of OpenBSD. More than one person has gotten a >> release CD and then gotten the packages in snapshots/packages/i386 >> which is "-current", the wip stuff that will be a part of the next release. > > The 600x has a CDRom/DVD drive in it. It comes standard. > >> Also, it would be good to post the contents of /var/run/dmesg.boot, to >> see what the kernel thinks of the hardware. Thats a start. > > I'll include something I sent to Donald Allen, edited to make things a > little more contextually relevant: > > "The key problem would keep happening [the freezing/slowdown]. Mostly > due to IRQ 11 being shared between USB, keyboard and PCMCIA. Large > amounts of traffic through that IRQ would cause locking issues in the > kernel. It really > is a hardware issue with that specific model of laptop; I had them > with FreeBSD [5.2], OpenBSD [4.1, 4.2, and 4.3], and Linux [2.6.10]." > > It's a problem I presumed was just with my 600x, but some of my > research has shown it's a model issue, related to IRQ assignment in > kernel. The only OS that hasn't had a problem with the hardware is > Windows XP. Whether that's due to the OS masking it or knowing > something more intimately about the odd hybrid of ACPI and APM the > BIOS presents, I can't say.
I ran Windows 2000 on my 600x for a time and that also worked well (at least with respect to the issue at hand). Having said that, I don't think I've ever run this machine in the configuration I was subjecting OpenBSD to -- wired to the network via pcmcia and moving a lot of data through that wire (I've usually used this machine wireless, thus lower bandwidth and interrupt frequency). So I can't say that I've ever subjected any other OS to the conditions that produced trouble with OpenBSD. I will be restoring the Arch Linux disk to this machine shortly. If I have a chance, I'll test it with the ethernet card and see if I can kill it. One way or another, I'll post what I find. As for OpenBSD, I've installed it on my TP G41 and have run across a couple of small problems (the Sawfish window manager does not work correctly; I've gone back to TWM -- I'm a minimalist; RCS does not work correctly with emacs VC -- I haven't figured that one out yet, though I suspect it's some small incompatibility in the OpenBSD reimplementation of RCS). Other than that, the system looks great thus far, and I'm probably going to proceed with replacing FreeBSD with it on my two main machines (a Thinkpad X61 and a Lenovo workstation). FreeBSD has serious problems with its USB support (which is being completely reimplemented in the upcoming version 8 release) and I do backups on sata drives in USB shoeboxes. This has forced me into a complicated system for backing up, involving an Arch Linux LiveCD and rsyncing my home directory to the backup disk with a Linux system, because I don't trust FreeBSD writing to those drives. I've done some preliminary testing with OpenBSD and have had no problems talking to those drives. If more testing turns up no problems, I'm sold. Thank you again for your help with the 600x issue. /Don Allen > > I'm just not surprised the problem still exists in 4.5.
